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Conditional Commitments: Reasoning and Model Checking

Published: 23 December 2014 Publication History

Abstract

While modeling interactions using social commitments provides a fundamental basis for capturing flexible and declarative interactions and helps in addressing the challenge of ensuring compliance with specifications, the designers of the system cannot guarantee that an agent complies with its commitments as it is supposed to, or at least an agent doesn't want to violate its commitments. They may still wish to develop efficient and scalable algorithms by which model checking conditional commitments, a natural and universal frame of social commitments, is feasible at design time. However, distinguishing between different but related types of conditional commitments, and developing dedicated algorithms to tackle the problem of model checking conditional commitments, is still an active research topic. In this article, we develop the temporal logic CTLcc that extends Computation Tree Logic (CTL) with new modalities which allow representing and reasoning about two types of communicating conditional commitments and their fulfillments using the formalism of interpreted systems. We introduce a set of rules to reason about conditional commitments and their fulfillments. The verification technique is based on developing a new symbolic model checking algorithm to address this verification problem. We analyze the computational complexity and present the full implementation of the developed algorithm on top of the MCMAS model checker. We also evaluate the algorithm's effectiveness and scalability by verifying the compliance of the NetBill protocol, taken from the business domain, and the process of breast cancer diagnosis and treatment, taken from the health-care domain, with specifications expressed in CTLcc. We finally compare the experimental results with existing proposals.

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cover image ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology
ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology  Volume 24, Issue 2
December 2014
224 pages
ISSN:1049-331X
EISSN:1557-7392
DOI:10.1145/2702120
Issue’s Table of Contents
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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Publication History

Published: 23 December 2014
Accepted: 01 September 2014
Revised: 01 August 2014
Received: 01 July 2013
Published in TOSEM Volume 24, Issue 2

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  1. Reasoning rules
  2. strong and weak conditional commitments

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