Choice, interoperability, and conformance in interaction protocols and service choreographies
Proceedings of The 8th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems - Volume 2
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Business process management in open environments remains a stubborn and important challenge. In open environments, autonomous organizations having heterogeneous information systems interact in an ever-evolving manner. The nature of the contractual relationships among such organizations has a significant bearing on the modeling of the business processes in which they participate. Conventional approaches are not suitable for open environments because (1) they lack support for modeling and management of contracts among organizations, (2) the modeling abstractions they offer do not afford crucial software engineering desiderata such as reuse, refinement, aggregation, and verification, and (3) they fail to provide the designers with guidelines on adapting the models should the underlying requirements change. We propose a novel approach for engineering interorganizational business interactions. Contractual relationships are modeled via commitments and the interactions for enacting the contracts are captured via the modular abstraction of protocols. Relative to how organizations value the various terms of the contracts and how the contracts are played out via protocols, safety and benefit of the contracts are reasoned about. A protocol specifies rules that govern the interactions among the organizations. Protocols can be published to a repository, shared, reused, refined, and aggregated. We propose a methodology—Amoeba—that guides software designers in the face of evolving requirements on how the protocols and contracts can be adapted. We evaluate protocols as an abstraction by applying it to model foreign exchange interactions. We find that not only can protocols precisely and adequately capture the necessary interactions, but also that novel interactions having serious business significance can be discovered during modeling. We propose and evaluate algorithms for checking the correctness properties of the contracts theoretically. We find that our method is sound with respect to pure-strategy Nash equilibria. Lastly, we evaluate Amoeba via a real-life insurance claim processing case study to handle three important kinds of changes in requirements: transactional, structural, and contextual. We find that via Amoeba, the changes can be accommodated simply by composing existing process models with new requirements.