We investigate the problem of locally monitoring contract regulated behaviours in agentbased web services. We encode contract clauses in service specifications by using extended timed automata. We propose a non intrusive local monitoring framework along with an API to monitor the fulfillment (or violation) of contractual obligations. A key feature of the framework is that it is fully symbolic t...

When dealing with Cloud Computing Services (CCSs) provisioning and usage, different degrees of complexity can be reached, depending on whether service composition is needed to satisfy users’ requests. This scenario demands effective ways for modelling CCSs and corresponding Service Level Agreements (SLAs) in order to facilitate service composition, comparison and monitoring. However, current SL...

Customization is essentially a pull system and customers’ demand for customized products is the ultimate force that drives a customization business. Research has been primarily focused on improving customizers’ efficiency in eliciting and fulfilling customers’ needs. This paper is concerned with customers’ procurement decisions when faced with multiple competing customizers. A conceptual framew...

The aim of this paper is to merge two approaches of software development: the component approach and the formal development approach. Developping software components is now a technique widely used by the software industry. These two approaches are not so distant if we consider Bertrand Meyer’s opinion: it is more complicated to reuse a component without contracts. One of the difficulties with t...

This paper describes a specialised logic for proving specifications in the Java Modeling Language (JML). JML is an interface specification language for Java. It allows assertions like invariants, constraints, preand post-conditions, and modifiable clauses as annotations to Java classes, in a design-by-contract style. Within the LOOP project at the University of Nijmegen JML is used for specific...

The UML as standardized language for visual object-oriented modeling allows to capture the requirements as well as the structure and behavior of complex software systems. With the increasing demands of todays systems, behavior aspects like concurrency, distribution and reactivity become more important. But the language concepts of the UML for describing behavioral aspects are weak compared to i...

Behavioural specifications in interface contracts are important measures for improving quality of software components. Common support for assertions as first class constructs in binary components and at runtime provides many benefits for better contracts specification and monitoring. Behavioural specifications in the spirit of Design by Contract can accompany binary components and be available ...

Autonomous agents within a multi-agent system can undertake behaviors that, while profitable for them, are damaging to the system as a whole. One way of regulating an agent’s behavior is by obliging it to act in accordance with a set of specifications set out in a contract, and sanctioning it otherwise. In this paper, We propose a framework that performs two major subtasks of contract based beh...

Nowadays, modern applications are often constructed by reusing and assembling distributed and collaborating entities, e.g., software components, Web services, or Software as a Service in cloud computing environments. In order to facilitate the integration of independently developed components (i.e., peers) that may reside in different organizations, it is necessary to provide a global contract ...