Combining Practical and Dialectical Commitments for Service Engagements

Abstract. We understand a service engagement as a form of collaboration aris-ing in a sociotechnical system (STS). Although STSs are fruitfully modeled using normative abstractions such as commitments, a conventional (practical) commit-ment 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 dialec-tical commitment, which we highlight, a debtor asserts to the creditor that the consequent is true if the antecedent is. For example, a customer may dialecti-cally 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 oper-ationalization of dialectical commitments that separates their objective and sub-jective 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 prac-tical and dialectical commitments. We validate our proposal using a real-world scenario of contradictory medical diagnoses by different specialists.