A Method for Specifying Contract Mediated Interactions

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.