Grafting Regulations into Business Protocols: Supporting the Analysis of Risks of Violation

The interaction of autonomous and heterogeneous business partners is often specified by business protocols. Particularly challenging is the case when such protocols must embed regulations, that change along time. In this work we focus on commitment-based protocols extended with temporal constraints among commitments and facts. We formalize a notion of “grafting” of new regulations inside protocols, where the new activities, foreseen by the regulation, are properly interleaved with the original ones thanks to the temporal constraints. We present a tool that exploitsthese principles to support the analysis of risks of violation, an apply it to two real-world case studies. This is a starting point for defining a notion of protocol compositionality that meets the requirements of flexible enactment, typical of cross-business settings, as well as that of modularity typical of Software Engineering.