Verification of relational transducers for electronic commerce

Abstract

Motivated by recent work of Abiteboul, Vianu, Fordham, and Yesha, we investigate the verifiability of transaction protocols specifying the interaction of multiple parties via a network. The protocols which we are concerned with typically occur in the context of electronic commerce applications and can be formalized as relational transducers. We introduce a class of powerful relational transducers based on Gurevich's abstract state machines and show that several verification problems related to electronic commerce applications are decidable for these transducers. (C) 2003 Published by Elsevier Science (USA).