A contract-based approach for monitoring collaborative Web services using commitments in the event calculus

Web services (WS) are gaining popularity for supporting business interactions in cross-organisational distributed business processes. However, current WS specifications mostly concentrate on syntactic aspects. Because multiparty collaborations in business involve complex and long-lived interactions between autonomous partners, their behaviour must be specified to ensure the reliability of the collaboration. This paper presents an event-based framework associated with a semantic definition of the commitments expressed in the event calculus, to model and monitor multi-party contracts. This framework permits to coordinate and regulate Web services in business collaborations, by allowing detection of actual and imminent violations.