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Published in:
2013 | OriginalPaper | Chapter
A Theory of Agreements and Protection
Authors : Massimo Bartoletti, Tiziana Cimoli, Roberto Zunino
Published in: Principles of Security and Trust
Publisher: Springer Berlin Heidelberg
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We present a theory of contracts. Contracts are interacting processes with an explicit notion of obligations and objectives. We model processes and their obligations as event structures. We define a general notion of
agreement
, by interpreting contracts as multi-player concurrent games. A participant agrees on a contract if she has a strategy to reach her objectives (or make another participant chargeable for a violation), whatever the moves of her adversaries. We then tackle the problem of
protection
. A participant is protected by a contract when she has a strategy to defend herself in all possible contexts, even in those where she has not reached an agreement. We show that, in a relevant class of contracts, agreements and protection mutually exclude each other. We then propose a novel formalism for modelling contractual obligations: event structures with circular causality. Using this model, we show how to construct contracts which guarantee both agreements and protection.