Principles of Commitment Protocols

存在于网络环境中的自治方--公司和个人--必然会进行互动。 协议结构化并简化了这些交互。 传统的协议表示指定了法律的操作顺序，但没有指定其内容。因此，传统的表示不能充分支持灵活的交互（例如，处理异常并利用机会。）该项目将通过一种称为承诺机的推理机制开发一个更丰富的协议模型，在该机制中，根据参与者的承诺为协议状态和动作制定声明性内容。 由于其内容的表示和基于推理的操作规则，承诺机有效地编码了协议的灵活版本，从而允许比传统表示更广泛的法律的移动。 该项目旨在研究协议和承诺机，捕获实际协议中所需的推理类型，例如电子商务。 具体来说，这个项目将1）制定一个语义的协议，适用于开放的，网络化的应用程序，2）表示协议的广义承诺机，3）实现承诺机的工具，协议的分析和设计，4）评估的方法，通过应用流行的工具和新兴的电子商务协议，和5）分类有用的和病态的承诺机。

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.