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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Massimo Strano, Dr Carlos Molina-Jimenez, Emeritus Professor Santosh Shrivastava
This paper assumes that business-to-business ({B2B}) interactions between trading partners are being regulated by electronic contracts. The electronic representation of terms and conditions of the contract should be such that it can be utilized at run time for compliance checking of business interactions between trading partners, ensuring that these interactions indeed correspond to meeting the rights and obligations that each partner has promised to honour. With this view in mind, the paper develops a model for establishing a correspondence between events that can be captured from the underlying messaging middleware (e.g., purchase order issued, invoice sent, purchase order canceled, etc) and the sets of rights, obligations and prohibitions that the trading partners have. Any attempt at the establishment of such a correspondence must resolve the technical issues that arise due to the distributed nature of the computation. A particularly difficult problem is establishing the validity of the actions of trading partners when business interactions have encountered software and hardware related problems (e.g., node crashes, clock skews, unpredictable transmission delays, message loss etc.). The model presents a technique for representing contractual rights, obligations and prohibitions of trading partners and shows how the events captured from the underlying messaging middleware can be combined in a careful manner for evaluating contractual compliance. The paper goes on to show how the model can form the basis for developing contract representation languages and run time systems for monitoring and enforcing contract compliance.
Author(s): Strano M, Molina-Jimenez C, Shrivastava S
Publication type: Report
Publication status: Published
Series Title: School of Computing Science Technical Report Series
Year: 2008
Pages: 21
Print publication date: 01/04/2008
Source Publication Date: April 2008
Report Number: 1094
Institution: School of Computing Science, University of Newcastle upon Tyne
Place Published: Newcastle upon Tyne
URL: http://www.cs.ncl.ac.uk/publications/trs/papers/1094.pdf
