Automatic conflict detection on contracts

Partially supported by the Nordunet3 project COSoDIS: “Contract-Oriented Software Development for Internet Services”.Many software applications are based on collaborating, yet competing, agents or virtual organisations exchanging services. Contracts, expressing obligations, permissions and prohibitions of the different actors, can be used to protect the interests of the organisations engaged in such service exchange. However, the potentially dynamic composition of services with different contracts, and the combination of service contracts with local contracts can give rise to unexpected conflicts, exposing the need for automatic techniques for contract analysis. In this paper we look at automatic analysis techniques for contracts written in the contract language CL. We present a trace semantics of CL suitable for conflict analysis, and a decision procedure for detecting conflicts (together with its proof of soundness, completeness and termination). We also discuss its implementation and look into the applications of the contract analysis approach we present. These techniques are applied to a small case study of an airline check-in desk.peer-reviewe

From Contracts in Structured English to CL Specifications

In this paper we present a framework to analyze conflicts of contracts written in structured English. A contract that has manually been rewritten in a structured English is automatically translated into a formal language using the Grammatical Framework (GF). In particular we use the contract language CL as a target formal language for this translation. In our framework CL specifications could then be input into the tool CLAN to detect the presence of conflicts (whether there are contradictory obligations, permissions, and prohibitions. We also use GF to get a version in (restricted) English of CL formulae. We discuss the implementation of such a framework.Comment: In Proceedings FLACOS 2011, arXiv:1109.239

A controlled language for the specification of contracts

Controlled natural languages have been used to enable the direct translation from natural language specifications into a formal description. In this paper we make a case for such an approach to write contracts, and translating into a temporal deontic logic. Combining both temporal behaviour and deontic behaviour is challenging both from a natural language and a formal logic perspective. We present both a logic and a controlled natural language and outline how the two can be linked.peer-reviewe

Evaluating how agent methodologies support the specification of the normative environment through the development process

[EN] Due to the increase in collaborative work and the decentralization of processes in many domains, there is an expanding demand for large-scale, flexible and adaptive software systems to support the interactions of people and institutions distributed in heterogeneous environments. Commonly, these software applications should follow specific regulations meaning the actors using them are bound by rights, duties and restrictions. Since this normative environment determines the final design of the software system, it should be considered as an important issue during the design of the system. Some agent-oriented software engineering methodologies deal with the development of normative systems (systems that have a normative environment) by integrating the analysis of the normative environment of a system in the development process. This paper analyses to what extent these methodologies support the analysis and formalisation of the normative environment and highlights some open issues of the topic.This work is partially supported by the PROMETEOII/2013/019, TIN2012-36586-C03-01, FP7-29493, TIN2011-27652-C03-00, CSD2007-00022 projects, and the CASES project within the 7th European Community Framework Program under the grant agreement No 294931.Garcia Marques, ME.; Miles, S.; Luck, M.; Giret Boggino, AS. (2014). Evaluating how agent methodologies support the specification of the normative environment through the development process. Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems. 1-20. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10458-014-9275-zS120Cossentino, M., Hilaire, V., Molesini, A., & Seidita, V. (Eds.). (2014). Handbook on agent-oriented design processes (Vol. VIII, 569 p. 508 illus.). Berlin: Springer.Akbari, O. (2010). A survey of agent-oriented software engineering paradigm: Towards its industrial acceptance. 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Verhagen (Eds.), Normative multi-agent systems, number 09121 in Dagstuhl seminar proceedings.Boella, G., Torre, L., & Verhagen, H. (2006). Introduction to normative multiagent systems. Computational and Mathematical Organization Theory, 12(2–3), 71–79.Bogdanovych, A., Esteva, M., Simoff, S., Sierra, C., & Berger, H. (2008). A methodology for developing multiagent systems as 3d electronic institutions. In M. Luck & L. Padgham (Eds.), Agent-Oriented Software Engineering VIII (Vol. 4951, pp. 103–117). Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Berlin: Springer.Boissier, O., Padget, J., Dignum, V., Lindemann, G., Matson, E., Ossowski, S., Sichman, J., & Vazquez-Salceda, J. (2006). Coordination, organizations, institutions and norms in multi-agent systems. LNCS (LNAI) (Vol. 3913).Bordini, R. H., Fisher, M., Visser, W., & Wooldridge, M. (2006). Verifying multi-agent programs by model checking. In Autonomous agents and multi-agent systems (Vol. 12, pp. 239–256). Hingham, MA: Kluwer Academic Publishers.Botti, V., Garrido, A., Giret, A., & Noriega, P. (2011). The role of MAS as a decision support tool in a water-rights market. In Post-proceedings workshops AAMAS2011 (Vol. 7068, pp. 35–49). Berlin: Springer.Breaux, T. (2009). Exercising due diligence in legal requirements acquisition: A tool-supported, frame-based approach. In Proceedings of the IEEE international requirements engineering conference (pp. 225–230).Breaux, T. D., & Baumer, D. L. (2011). Legally reasonable security requirements: A 10-year ftc retrospective. Computers and Security, 30(4), 178–193.Breaux, T. D., Vail, M. W., & Anton, A. I. (2006). Towards regulatory compliance: Extracting rights and obligations to align requirements with regulations. In Proceedings of the 14th IEEE international requirements engineering conference, RE ’06 (pp. 46–55). Washington, DC: IEEE Computer Society.Bresciani, P., Perini, A., Giorgini, P., Giunchiglia, F., & Mylopoulos, J. (2004). Tropos: An agent-oriented software development methodology. Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, 8(3), 203–236.Cardoso, H. L., & Oliveira, E. (2008). A contract model for electronic institutions. In COIN’07: Proceedings of the 2007 international conference on Coordination, organizations, institutions, and norms in agent systems III (pp. 27–40).Castor, A., Pinto, R. C., Silva, C. T. L. L., & Castro, J. (2004). Towards requirement traceability in tropos. In WER (pp. 189–200).Chopra, A., Dalpiaz, F., Giorgini, P., & Mylopoulos, J. (2009). Modeling and reasoning about service-oriented applications via goals and commitments. ICST conference on digital business.Cliffe, O., Vos, M., & Padget, J. (2006). Specifying and analysing agent-based social institutions using answer set programming. In O. Boissier, J. Padget, V. Dignum, G. Lindemann, E. Matson, S. Ossowski, J. Sichman, & J. Vázquez-Salceda (Eds.), Coordination, organizations, institutions, and norms in multi-agent systems. Lecture Notes in Computer Science (Vol. 3913, pp. 99–113). Springer. Berlin.Criado, N., Argente, E., Garrido, A., Gimeno, J. A., Igual, F., Botti, V., Noriega, P., & Giret, A. (2011). Norm enforceability in Electronic Institutions? In Coordination, organizations, institutions, and norms in agent systems VI (Vol. 6541, pp. 250–267). Springer.Dellarocas, C., & Klein, M. (2001). Contractual agent societies. In R. Conte & C. Dellarocas (Eds.), Social order in multiagent systems (Vol. 2, pp. 113–133)., Multiagent Systems, Artificial Societies, and Simulated Organizations New York: Springer.DeLoach, S. A. (2008). Developing a multiagent conference management system using the o-mase process framework. In Proceedings of the international conference on agent-oriented software engineering VIII (pp. 168–181).DeLoach, S. A., & Garcia-Ojeda, J. C. (2010). O-mase; a customisable approach to designing and building complex, adaptive multi-agent systems. International Journal of Agent-Oriented Software Engineering, 4(3), 244–280.DeLoach, S. A., Padgham, L., Perini, A., Susi, A., & Thangarajah, J. (2009). Using three aose toolkits to develop a sample design. International Journal Agent-Oriented Software Engineering, 3, 416–476.Dignum, F., Dignum, V., Thangarajah, J., Padgham, L., & Winikoff, M. (2007). Open agent systems? Eighth international workshop on agent oriented software engineering (AOSE) in AAMAS07.Dignum, V. (2003). A model for organizational interaction:based on agents, founded in logic. PhD thesis, Utrecht University.Dignum, V., Meyer, J., Dignum, F., & Weigand, H. (2003). Formal specification of interaction in agent societies. Formal approaches to agent-based systems (Vol. 2699).Dignum, V., Vazquez-Salceda, J., & Dignum, F. (2005). Omni: Introducing social structure, norms and ontologies into agent organizations. In R. Bordini, M. Dastani, J. Dix, & A. Seghrouchni (Eds.)Programming multi-agent systems. Lecture Notes in Computer Science (Vol. 3346, pp. 181–198). Berlin: Springer.d’Inverno, M., Luck, M., Noriega, P., Rodriguez-Aguilar, J., & Sierra, C. (2012). Communicating open systems, 186, 38–94.Elsenbroich, C., & Gilbert, N. (2014). Agent-based modelling. In Modelling norms (pp. 65–84). Dordrecht: Springer.Esteva, M., Rosell, B., Rodriguez, J. A., & Arcos, J. L. (2004). AMELI: An agent-based middleware for electronic institutions. In AAMAS04 (pp. 236–243).Fenech, S., Pace, G. J., & Schneider, G. (2009). Automatic conflict detection on contracts. In Proceedings of the 6th international colloquium on theoretical aspects of computing, ICTAC ’09 (pp. 200–214).Garbay, C., Badeig, F., & Caelen, J. (2012). Normative multi-agent approach to support collaborative work in distributed tangible environments. In Proceedings of the ACM 2012 conference on computer supported cooperative work companion, CSCW ’12 (pp. 83–86). New York, NY: ACM.Garcia, E., Giret, A., & Botti, V. (2011). Regulated open multi-agent systems based on contracts. In Information Systems Development (pp. 243–255).Garcia, E., Tyson, G., Miles, S., Luck, M., Taweel, A., Staa, T. V., & Delaney, B. (2012). An analysis of agent-oriented engineering of e-health systems. In 13th international eorkshop on sgent-oriented software engineering (AOSE-AAMAS).Garcia, E., Tyson, G., Miles, S., Luck, M., Taweel, A., Staa, T. V., and Delaney, B. (2013). Analysing the Suitability of Multiagent Methodologies for e-Health Systems. In Agent-Oriented Software Engineering XIII, volume 7852, pages 134–150. Springer-Verlag.Garrido, A., Giret, A., Botti, V., & Noriega, P. (2013). mWater, a case study for modeling virtual markets. In New perspectives on agreement technologies (Vol. Law, Gover, pp. 563–579). Springer.Gteau, B., Boissier, O., & Khadraoui, D. (2006). Multi-agent-based support for electronic contracting in virtual enterprises. IFAC Symposium on Information Control Problems in Manufacturing (INCOM), 150(3), 73–91.Hollander, C. D., & Wu, A. S. (2011). The current state of normative agent-based systems. Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, 14(2), 6.Hsieh, F.-S. (2005). Automated negotiation based on contract net and petri net. In E-commerce and web technologies. Lecture Notes in Computer Science (Vol. 3590, pp. 148–157).Kollingbaum, M., Jureta, I. J., Vasconcelos, W., & Sycara, K. (2008). Automated requirements-driven definition of norms for the regulation of behavior in multi-agent systems. In Proceedings of the AISB 2008 workshop on behaviour regulation in multi-agent systems, Aberdeen, Scotland, U.K., April 2008.Li, T., Balke, T., Vos, M., Satoh, K., & Padget, J. (2013). Detecting conflicts in legal systems. In Y. Motomura, A. Butler, & D. Bekki (Eds.), New Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence (Vol. 7856, pp. 174–189)., Lecture Notes in Computer Science Berlin Heidelberg: Springer.Lomuscio, A., Qu, H., & Solanki, M. (2010) Towards verifying contract regulated service composition. Journal of Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (pp. 1–29).Lopez, F., Luck, M., & d’Inverno, M. (2006). A normative framework for agent-based systems. Computational and Mathematical Organization Theory, 12, 227–250.Lpez, F. y, Luck, M., & dInverno, M. (2006). A normative framework for agent-based systems. Computational and Mathematical Organization Theory, 12(2–3), 227–250.Mader, P., & Egyed, A. (2012). Assessing the effect of requirements traceability for software maintenance. In 28th IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance (ICSM) (pp. 171–180), Sept 2012.Mao, X., & Yu, E. (2005). Organizational and social concepts in agent oriented software engineering. In AOSE IV. Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence (Vol. 3382, pp. 184–202).Meyer, J.-J. C., & Wieringa, R. J. (Eds.). (1993). Deontic logic in computer science: Normative system specification. Chichester, UK: Wiley.Okouya, D., & Dignum, V. (2008). Operetta: A prototype tool for the design, analysis and development of multi-agent organizations (demo paper). In AAMAS (pp. 1667–1678).Malone, T. W., Smith J. B., & Olson, G. M. (2001). Coordination theory and collaboration technology. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Oren, N., Panagiotidi, S., Vázquez-Salceda, J., Modgil, S., Luck, M., & Miles, S. (2009). Towards a formalisation of electronic contracting environments. COIN (pp. 156–171).Osman, N., Robertson, D., & Walton, C. (2006). Run-time model checking of interaction and deontic models for multi-agent systems. In AAMAS ’06: Proceedings of the fifth international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems (pp. 238–240). 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Verificación automática de documentos normativos: ¿ficción o realidad?

El desarrollo de toda pieza de software de cierta escala comienza por una etapa que se conoce como especificación, donde se describen las tareas que el software debe realizar. Estas especificaciones tienen en general una inclinación deóntica, pues indican cuáles comportamientos del sistema bajo estudio son permitidos y cuáles no lo son. Siendo un producto humano, suelen contener errores, contradicciones, casos sin cubrir, etc. Dentro de la Ingeniería del Software existen técnicas y herramientas lógico-matemáticas llamadas métodos formales, que analizan esas especificaciones en busca de defectos, de muy difícil hallazgo manual. Tomando como base las similitudes entre la especificación de software y la de las normas legales, este artículo explora la idea de trasladar al terreno legislativo las técnicas y herramientas que han resultado exitosas para verificar software. Además de repasar los antecedentes académicos en la interacción Informática-Derecho, aplicamos algunas de las técnicas mencionadas a un caso de estudio real en el que encontramos “lagunas” que podrían ser abusadas, y proponemos una agenda de investigación para el área.Sociedad Argentina de Informática e Investigación Operativ

(I) A Declarative Framework for ERP Systems(II) Reactors: A Data-Driven Programming Model for Distributed Applications

To those who can be swayed by argument and those who know they do not have all the answers This dissertation is a collection of six adapted research papers pertaining to two areas of research. (I) A Declarative Framework for ERP Systems: • POETS: Process-Oriented Event-driven Transaction Systems. The paper describes an ontological analysis of a small segment of the enterprise domain, namely the general ledger and accounts receivable. The result is an event-based approach to designing ERP systems and an abstract-level sketch of the architecture. • Compositional Specification of Commercial Contracts. The paper de-scribes the design, multiple semantics, and use of a domain-specific lan-guage (DSL) for modeling commercial contracts. • SMAWL: A SMAll Workflow Language Based on CCS. The paper show

A toolkit for model checking of electronic contracts

PhD ThesisIn the business world, contracts are used to regulate business interactions between trading parties. In this context, an electronic contracting systems can be used to monitor business–to–business interactions to ensure that they comply with the rights (permissions), obligations and prohibitions stipulated in contract clauses. Such an electronic contracting system will require an executable version of the contract (e-contract) for compliance checking. It is important to be verify the correctness properties of an e- contract before deploying it for compliance checking. Model checkers are widely used for automatic verification of concurrent systems. However, such tools for e-contracts with means for expressing directly and intu- itively key concepts that appear recurrently in contracts, such as execu- tions of business operations, granting (cancellation, suspension, fulfilment, violation, etc.) of rights, obligations and prohibitions to role players are not yet available. This thesis rectifies the situation by developing a high-level e-contract verification toolkit using the Spin model checker. A formal Contractual Business-To-Business interaction (CB2B) model based on the concepts of contract compliance checking developed earlier at Newcastle university has been constructed. Further, Promela, the input language of the Spin model checker, has been extended in a manner that enables specification of contract clauses in terms of contract entities: role players, business operations, rights, obligations and prohibitions. A given contract can now be expressed using extended Promela as a set of declarations and a set of Event-Condition-Action rules. In addition, the designer can specify the correctness requirements to be verified in Linear-Temporal-Logic directly in terms of the contract entities. A notable feature is that the CB2B model automatically checks for contract independent properties: properties that must hold for all contracts. For example, at run time, a contract should not simultaneously grant a role player a right to perform an operation and also prohibit it. Thus, the toolkit hides much of the intricate details of dealing with Promela processes communicating through channels and enables a designer to build verifiable abstract models directly in terms of contract entities. The usefulness of the toolkit is demonstrated by trying out a number of contract examples used by researchers working on contract verification. The thesis also shows how the toolkit can be used for generating test cases for testing an implemented system

Model checking contracts : a case study

Abstract. Contracts are agreements between distinct parties that de-termine rights and obligations on their signatories, and have been intro-duced in order to reduce risks and to regulate inter-business relationships. In this paper we first show how a conventional contract can be written in the contract language CL, and then we verify the correctness of the contract with respect to certain desired properties, using the NuSMV model checking tool.