Combining Practical and Dialectical Commitments for Service Engagements

We understand a service engagement as a form of collaboration arising in a sociotechnical system (STS). Although STSs are fruitfully modeled using normative abstractions such as commitments, a conventional (practical) commitment can capture only part of the story, namely, a debtor’s promise to the creditor to bring about the consequent if the antecedent holds. In contrast, in a dialectical commitment, which we highlight, a debtor asserts to the creditor that the consequent is true if the antecedent is. For example, a customer may dialectically commit to a seller that the product she received is damaged but may not practically commit to damaging the product. We introduce a novel bipartite operationalization of dialectical commitments that separates their objective and subjective aspects and thus avoids the problems arising if we merely treat dialectical like practical commitments. We express that operationalization in temporal logic, developing a verification tool based on NuSMV, a well-known model-checker, to verify if the participants’ interactions comply with the participants’ dialectical commitments. We present a set of modeling patterns that incorporate both practical and dialectical commitments. We validate our proposal using a real-world scenario of contradictory medical diagnoses by different specialists.