Representing and reasoning about commitments in business processes

A variety of business relationships in open settings can be un-derstood in terms of the creation and manipulation of commit-ments among the participants. These include B2C and B2B contracts and processes, as realized via Web services and other such technologies. Business protocols, an interaction-oriented approach for modeling business processes, are for-mulated in terms of the commitments. Commitments can support other forms of semantic service composition as well. This paper shows how to represent and reason about com-mitments in a general manner. Unlike previous formaliza-tions, the proposed formalization accommodates complex and nested commitment conditions, and concurrent commit-ment operations. In this manner, a rich variety of open busi-ness scenarios are enabled