A unifying framework for transactions in competitive and cooperative environments
Panayiotis K. Chrysanthis, Krithi Ramamritham · 1991
Recently, a number of extensions to the traditional transaction model have been proposed to support new information-intensive applications such as CAD/CAM and software development. However, these extended transaction models capture only a subset of interactions that can be found in such applications, and represent only some of the points within the spectrum of interactions possible in competitive and cooperative environments. ACTA is a formalizable framework intended for characterizing the whole spectrum of interactions. The ACTA framework is not yet another transaction model, but it consolidates the different transaction models into a unified and versatile framework. ACTA allows for specifying the structure and the behavior of transactions as well as for reasoning about the concurrency and recovery properties of the transactions. In ACTA, the semantics of interactions are expressed in terms of transactions' effects on each other and on the objects that they access. Its ability to ca...