On the enactability of business protocols
Nirmit V. Desai, Munindar P. Singh · 2008
Protocols specifying business interactions among au-tonomous parties enable reuse and promote interoperability. A protocol is specified from a global viewpoint, but enacted in a distributed manner by (agents playing) different roles. Each role describes a local representation. An ill-specified protocol may yield roles that fail to produce correct enact-ments of the protocol. Existing approaches lack a formal and comprehensive treatment of this problem. Building on recent work on declaratively specifying a protocol as a set of rules of causal logic, this paper formally defines the enactability of protocols. It presents necessary and sufficient conditions for the enactability of a protocol as well as a decision procedure for extracting correct roles from enactable protocols.