Affiliations: Distributed Systems and Modelling Research Group,
School of Mathematical and Information Sciences, Coventry University, Coventry,
CV1 5FB, UK | Department of Industrial Management, Aletheia
University, Taiwan
Abstract: Engineering design activities in distributed environments like the
Web require fault tolerance and concurrent access to shared resources such as
databases and Web servers. Such activities are generally dynamic, cooperative,
long-lived, interactive and non-prescriptive. We propose a new multi-agent
transaction model, which is based on extended transactions and multi-agent
technologies. The novelty of this model is that it automatically customises
transactions to the requirements of design activities. In addition, this model
is believed to improve concurrency, fault tolerance, facilitate interaction
between and co-operation among the participating systems involved in design
activities. The proposed model is formally specified using CCS (Calculus of
Communicating Systems) language. Formalisation is crucial in ensuring the
correctness, reliability, and recovery of multi-agents transactions, given the
complex and unreliable nature of the distributed design activities.
