|
Abstract
Complex purchase protocols allow several participants
(merchants and clients) to be involved within a
single purchase transaction.
Moreover, they provide the possibility to merge
different heterogeneous payments into one atomic
transaction. Although such complex purchases are
urgently required, they are, so far, neither provided
by existing protocols nor by available products or
research prototypes.
In this paper we show how to dynamically build such
complex heterogeneous purchase processes in a reliable
way, by modeling complex interactions between several
merchants and clients as transactional processes.
Apart from the distribution aspect, we focus on the
heterogeneity of the electronic purchase, by allowing
different existing protocols for payment or goods
transfer to be merged incrementally, as the user
performs a distributed purchase on the Internet.
Before executing such a complex purchase, we provide a
(technical) analysis of the resulting process which
yields the properties of the compound transaction like
atomicity, debit/credit character, or anonymity.
We have implemented a Purchase Coordinator prototype
which allows for an incremental analysis of compound
purchase transactions and which supports the execution
of the corresponding purchase processes.
You can directly download a postscript (979 KB) version of this paper.
|