On the Enactability of Business Protocols

Abstract

Protocols specifying business interactions among autonomous parties enable reuse and promote interoperability. A protocol is specified from a global viewpoint, but enacted in a distributed manner by (agents playing) different roles. Each role describes a local representation. An ill-specified protocol may yield roles that fail to produce correct enactments of the protocol. Existing approaches lack a formal and comprehensive treatment of this problem. Building on recent work on declaratively specifying a protocol as a set of rules of causal logic, this paper formally defines the enactability of protocols. It presents necessary and sufficient conditions for the enactability of a protocol as well as a decision procedure for extracting correct roles from enactable protocols.