Principles of Commitment Protocols

存在于网络环境中的自治各方--包括公司和个人--必须强制互动。协议构建并简化了这些交互。协议的传统表示法规定了合法的行动顺序，但不规定其内容。因此，传统表示法不能充分支持灵活的交互(例如，处理异常和利用机会)。该项目将通过称为承诺机器的推理机制开发更丰富的协议模型，在该机制中，根据参与者的承诺为协议状态和行动制定声明性内容。由于其内容表示和基于推理的操作规则，承诺机器有效地对协议的灵活版本进行编码，从而允许比传统表示法更广泛的法律动作。这个项目寻求研究协议和承诺机器，捕获实际协议中所需的推理类型，例如电子商务。具体地说，本项目将1)制定适用于开放的、网络应用的协议的语义，2)将协议表示为通用的承诺机器，3)在协议分析和设计工具中实现承诺机器，4)通过将该工具应用于流行的和新兴的电子商务协议来评估该方法，5)对有用的和病态的承诺机器进行分类。

Autonomous parties - both companies and people - who exist in networked environments must perforce interact. Protocols structure and streamline those interactions. Traditional representations of protocols specify legal sequences of actions but not their content. Thus, traditional representations cannot adequately support flexible interactions (e.g., to handle exceptions and exploit opportunities.) This project will develop a richer model of protocols via an inference mechanism, called commitment machines, in which a declarative content is formulated for protocol states and actions in terms of the participants' commitments. Because of its representation of content and its inferencing-based operational rules, a commitment machine effectively encodes a flexible version of a protocol, thereby allowing a wider variety of legal moves than traditional representations. This project seeks to study protocols and commitment machines, capturing the kinds of reasoning needed in practical protocols, such as for e-commerce. Specifically, this project will 1) formulate a semantics for protocols that applies in open, networked applications, 2) represent protocols as generalized commitment machines, 3) implement commitment machines in a tool for protocol analysis and design, 4) evaluate the approach by applying the tool on popular and emerging e-commerce protocols, and 5) classify useful and pathological kinds of commitment machines.