A method for specifying contract mediated interactions

Author

Molina-Jimenez, Carlos ; Shrivastava, Santosh ; Warne, John

Author_Institution

Sch. of Comput. Sci., Newcastle Univ., Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK

fYear

2005

fDate

19-23 Sept. 2005

Firstpage

106

Lastpage

115

Abstract

To form and automatically manage partnerships within a virtual organisation, it is necessary to have an electronic representation of the contract governing business relationships that can be used to mediate the rights and obligations that each interacting entity promises to honour. The paper describes a general method of representing business interactions using a widely used modelling language Promela and discusses how to represent permissions, obligations, prohibitions, actors (agents), time constraints, and message type checking; that is, all the basic parameters that compose most typical business contracts. Two levels of contract representations are described: implementation neutral, and implementation specific, that is a refinement of the former to include technical details such as acknowledgements and synchronization messages that form an important part of any implementation.

Keywords

contracts; formal specification; virtual enterprises; Promela modelling language; contract mediated interactions specification; contract representations; implementation neutral representation; implementation specific representation; message type checking; time constraints; virtual organization; Collaboration; Computational modeling; Contracts; Electronic commerce; Natural languages; Permission; Resource management; Time factors; Web and internet services;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

EDOC Enterprise Computing Conference, 2005 Ninth IEEE International

Print_ISBN

0-7695-2441-9

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/EDOC.2005.1

Filename

1540672