Executable Trading-Partner Agreements in Electronic Commerce 1

Abstract

In business to business electronic commerce, the terms and conditions describing the electronic interaction between businesses can be expressed as an electronic contract or trading-partner agreement (TPA) from which configuration information and code which embodies the terms and conditions can be generated automatically. This paper first discusses issues related to contracts and more generally to inter-business electronic interactions. Next, we describe the basic principles of electronic TPAs. The TPA expresses the rules of interaction between the parties to the TPA while maintaining complete independence of the internal processes at each party from the other parties. It represents a long-running conversation that comprises a single unit of business. Next, we describe our TPA language. We then describe tools for authoring TPAs and generating code from them. Finally, we describe an example of an application which can benefit from TPAs. 1. Introduction Contracts describe legally enforc...