Specification and Verification of Communication Constraints for Interoperable Transactions

The specification of communication behavior is fundamental in developing interoperable transactions. In particular, the temporal ordering of messages exchanged between different communicating agents must be declaratively specified and verified in order to guarantee consistency of data in the various component systems. This paper shows that by expressing communication constraints in propositional temporal logic, the tableau method can be applied to construct a dependency graph. If the specification is correct, this method guarantees that all possible execution paths satisfying the specification will be generated. The declarative specification and verification of communication constraints in interoperable transactions is demonstrated using the classic business trip. It is argued that the specification formalism provides an improvement over the Flexible Transaction Model.

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