On the modelling of document exchange processes in e-commerce protocols

This paper presents an approach to modelling e-commerce protocols in a combined language of CSP and Z. It is illustrated by a practical application on one of the most important Internet retailing protocol, Internet Open Trading Protocol (IOTP). Compared to related works informal modelling and analysis of e-commerce protocols, our approach concentrates more on realistically capturing the XML document exchange processes of the protocols, which we believe is central to most e-commerce protocols. For this purpose we adopt a combination of CSP and Z formalism with new extensions, which finally proves to be expressive in describing both the data and the behavior aspects of the document exchange process.