research-article

Formalizing and verifying protocol refinements

Authors:

Scott N. Gerard,

Munindar P. SinghAuthors Info & Claims

ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology (TIST), Volume 4, Issue 2

Article No.: 21, Pages 1 - 27

https://doi.org/10.1145/2438653.2438656

Published: 03 April 2013 Publication History

Abstract

A (business) protocol describes, in high-level terms, a pattern of communication between two or more participants, specifically via the creation and manipulation of the commitments between them. In this manner, a protocol offers both flexibility and rigor: a participant may communicate in any way it chooses as long as it discharges all of its activated commitments. Protocols thus promise benefits in engineering cross-organizational business processes. However, software engineering using protocols presupposes a formalization of protocols and a notion of the refinement of one protocol by another. Refinement for protocols is both intuitively obvious (e.g., PayViaCheck is clearly a kind of Pay) and technically nontrivial (e.g., compared to Pay, PayViaCheck involves different participants exchanging different messages). This article formalizes protocols and their refinement. It develops Proton, an analysis tool for protocol specifications that overlays a model checker to compute whether one protocol refines another with respect to a stated mapping. Proton and its underlying theory are evaluated by formalizing several protocols from the literature and verifying all and only the expected refinements.

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Cited By

Lomuscio AQu HRaimondi F(2017)MCMASInternational Journal on Software Tools for Technology Transfer (STTT)10.1007/s10009-015-0378-x19:1(9-30)Online publication date: 1-Feb-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s10009-015-0378-x
Baldoni MBaroglio CChopra ASingh M(2015)Composing and verifying commitment-based multiagent protocolsProceedings of the 24th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence10.5555/2832249.2832251(10-17)Online publication date: 25-Jul-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/2832249.2832251
El Menshawy MBentahar JEl Kholy WYolum PDssouli R(2015)Computational logics and verification techniques of multi-agent commitments: surveyThe Knowledge Engineering Review10.1017/S026988891500006530:05(564-606)Online publication date: 6-Aug-2015
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0269888915000065
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Published In

cover image ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology

ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology Volume 4, Issue 2

Special section on agent communication, trust in multiagent systems, intelligent tutoring and coaching systems

March 2013

339 pages

ISSN:2157-6904

EISSN:2157-6912

DOI:10.1145/2438653

Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2013 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

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Publication History

Published: 03 April 2013

Accepted: 01 April 2011

Revised: 01 January 2011

Received: 01 August 2010

Published in TIST Volume 4, Issue 2

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Cited By

Lomuscio AQu HRaimondi F(2017)MCMASInternational Journal on Software Tools for Technology Transfer (STTT)10.1007/s10009-015-0378-x19:1(9-30)Online publication date: 1-Feb-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s10009-015-0378-x
Baldoni MBaroglio CChopra ASingh M(2015)Composing and verifying commitment-based multiagent protocolsProceedings of the 24th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence10.5555/2832249.2832251(10-17)Online publication date: 25-Jul-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/2832249.2832251
El Menshawy MBentahar JEl Kholy WYolum PDssouli R(2015)Computational logics and verification techniques of multi-agent commitments: surveyThe Knowledge Engineering Review10.1017/S026988891500006530:05(564-606)Online publication date: 6-Aug-2015
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0269888915000065
Kholy WBentahar JMenshawy MQu HDssouli R(2014)Conditional CommitmentsACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/268561324:2(1-49)Online publication date: 23-Dec-2014
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2685613
El Kholy WBentahar JEl Menshawy MQu HDssouli R(2014)Modeling and verifying choreographed multi-agent-based web service compositions regulated by commitment protocolsExpert Systems with Applications: An International Journal10.1016/j.eswa.2014.05.04641:16(7478-7494)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2014
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.eswa.2014.05.046
Sultan KBentahar JEl-Menshawy M(2014)Model checking probabilistic social commitments for intelligent agent communicationApplied Soft Computing10.1016/j.asoc.2014.04.01422(397-409)Online publication date: 1-Sep-2014
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.asoc.2014.04.014
Baldoni MBaroglio CMarengo EPatti VCapuzzimati F(2014)Engineering commitment-based business protocols with the 2CL methodologyAutonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems10.1007/s10458-013-9233-128:4(519-557)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2014
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s10458-013-9233-1
Gerard SSingh MGini MShehory OIto TJonker C(2013)Evolving protocols and agents in multiagent systemsProceedings of the 2013 international conference on Autonomous agents and multi-agent systems10.5555/2484920.2485078(997-1004)Online publication date: 6-May-2013
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/2484920.2485078
Chopra AArtikis ABentahar JColombetti MDignum FFornara NJones ASingh MYolum P(2013)Research directions in agent communicationACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology10.1145/2438653.24386554:2(1-23)Online publication date: 3-Apr-2013
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2438653.2438655
El-Menshawy MBentahar JEl Kholy WDssouli R(2013)Verifying conformance of multi-agent commitment-based protocolsExpert Systems with Applications: An International Journal10.1016/j.eswa.2012.07.03040:1(122-138)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2013
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.eswa.2012.07.030

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