Title page for ETD etd-08162005-125546

Type of Document

Master's Thesis

Author

Wagle, Leena V,

Author's Email Address

lvwagle@unity.ncsu.edu

URN

etd-08162005-125546

Title

Incorporating Business Policies into Business Protocols

Degree

Master of Science

Graduate Program

Computer Science

Advisory Committee

Advisor Name	Title
Dr. Munindar Singh	Committee Chair

Keywords

Agents
Protocols
Policies
Business Process

Date of Defense

2005-08-16

Availability

unrestricted

Abstract

A business process streamlines how different business parties interact with one another,
in order to achieve a business goal. The modeling and enactment of business process is
notoriously complex, especially in open systems where the participants are autonomous
and heterogeneous. Conceptually, a business process consists of two important elements;
the business protocols that specify the interactions between the partners and the business policies that drive the partners? behavior during the enactment of protocols.
Business policies are an integral and important component of business processes. Business
policies are often expressed and implemented as business rules. It is common to
embed these business rules within the business process implementation. When the business
practices or policies change, as they often do, it is difficult to dynamically manage
these changes without affecting the business process implementation. It is a challenge to
correctly reflect the policy changes with minimal or no change to the implementation of the
business process. The conventional workflow approaches of representing business policies,
reduce the flexibility and reusability of business processes.
It is possible to control the behavior of protocol participants dynamically, without
changing the protocol specification by representing the private internal business policies
separate from the generic, public business protocols. However, given a separate policy and
protocol specification, it is important that when the participants enact the protocol, the behavior
dictated by their local policies be congruent with the protocol specifications. The
focus of this thesis is to develop a methodology to configure the private policies of the
participant such that, its behavior during protocol enactment is always compliant with the
protocol. We propose a methodology that describes how the agent policies should be added
to the protocol specification such that the protocol is not violated during enactment.

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