Invited Talk

Speaker: Munindar P. Singh (North Carolina State University)

Title: Understanding Policies in Commitment Protocols

Abstract: Business processes in open environments are best modeled and enacted as protocols among autonomous and heterogeneous business partners or agents. The autonomy and heterogeneity of the agents is reflected in their business policies: others don't care as long as the agreed upon protocols are followed. Moreover, the policies can involve proprietary reasoning and potentially be kept private. Previous research has developed a protocol-based approach for processes that is centered around the notion of commitments among agents. This paper goes further by proposing a declarative treatment of policies and their interplay with the roles that the agents adopt in enacting specific protocols. Reasoning about policies is particularly important from the standpoint of an agent's commitments. If designed well, an agent's policies may ensure its compliance with the protocol while enabling it to flexibly handle exceptions and exploit opportunities. If designed poorly, an agent's policies may cause it to be unnecessarily rigid or noncompliant with the protocol. This paper summarizes commitment protocols as used to model business processes, introduces policies in conjunction with protocols, and discusses various design criteria for policies. This is joint work with Amit K. Chopra.