TU Wien Informatics

20 Years

Accountable Objects: Modeling Liability in Open Distributed Systems

  • 2013-01-28
  • Research

As an increasing amount of commercial activity becomes automated, the importance of techniques for providing complete system specifications increases.

Abstract

As an increasing amount of commercial activity becomes automated, the importance of techniques for providing complete system specifications, checking the correctness of interactions and flagging incorrect behaviour increases. The aim throughout is to generate more complete information about the system and so to produce IT solutions that reflect the business requirements accurately. So far, most efforts have been placed on the appropriate specification of the system behavior and then on the non-functional requirements that constitute the contract between a system and its users. But in fully-automated commercial systems, such as Cloud Computing or SOA systems, we should also consider the liability of the different parties, since we should be able to assign responsibility to objects and, more importantly, to know in case of problems or contract violations, which one should be blamed.

The consequence of these considerations is that we need the ability to express more directly the necessary obligations and other deontic concepts, such as permissions and prohibitions, giving the designer the tools for extending the behavioural information to make it clear where obligations apply and with what detailed properties. In this talk we describe current activities within the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) to extend the ODP family of standards for the expression of policies using deontic logic, and on how to improve support for deontic concepts based on their reification.

Biography

Antonio Vallecillo is Professor of Computer Science at the University of Málaga. His research interests include model-based software engineering, open distributed processing and software quality. Between 1986 and 1995 he was in the computer industry, working for Fujitsu and ICL. In 1996 he joined the University of Málaga, where he currently conducts research on software modeling and analysis. He is also involved in different standardization activities within AENOR, ISO, ITU-T and the OMG, being the Spanish representative at IFIP TC2. He has organized several international conferences, including ECOOP 2002, TOOLS 2010 and MODELS 2013, and has served as PC Chair for ICMT, TOOLS, ECMFA and QoSA.

Contact person at the TU Vienna

Katja Hildebrandt: Tel. +43 1 588 01 – 188 04

Note

This talk is organized by the Business Informatics Group at the Institute of Software Technology and Interactive Systems. Supported by the Austrian Computer Society (OCG) and the Center for Computer Science (Zentrum für Informatik Forschung, ZIF).

Speakers

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