Modelling and Administration of Contract-Based Systems

Mirroring the paper versions exchanged between businesses today, electronic contracts offer the possibility of dynamic, automatic creation and enforcement of restrictions and compulsions on agent behaviour that are designed to ensure business objectives are met. However, where there are many contracts within a particular application, it can be difficult to determine whether the system can reliably fulfil them all; computer-parsable electronic contracts may allow such verification to be automated. In this paper, we describe a conceptual framework and architecture specification in which normative business contracts can be electronically represented, verified, established, renewed, etc. In particular, we aim to allow systems containing multiple contracts to be checked for conflicts and violations of business objectives. We illustrate the framework and architecture with an aerospace example.

Towards a Monitoring Framework for Agent-Based Contract Systems

The behaviours of autonomous agents may deviate from those deemed to be for the good of the societal systems of which they are a part. Norms have therefore been proposed as a means to regulate agent behaviours in open and dynamic systems, and may be encoded in electronic contracts in order to specify the obliged, permitted and prohibited behaviours of agents that are signatories to such contracts. Enactment and management of electronic contracts thus enables the use of regulatory mechanisms to ensure that agent behaviours comply with the encoded norms. To facilitate such mechanisms requires monitoring in order to detect and explain violation of norms. In this paper we propose a framework for monitoring that is to be implemented and integrated into a suite of contract enactment and management tools. The framework adopts a non-intrusive approach to monitoring, whereby the states of a contract with respect to its contained norms can be inferred on the basis of messages exchanged. Specifically, the framework deploys agents that observe messages sent between contract signatories, where these messages correspond to agent behaviours and therefore indicate whether norms are, or are in danger of, being violated.

Electronic Business Contracts between Services

Electronic contracts mirror the paper versions exchanged between businesses today, and offer the possibility of dynamic, automatic creation and enforcement of restrictions and compulsions on service behaviour that are designed to ensure business objectives are met. Where there are many contracts within a particular application, it can be difficult to determine whether the system can reliably fulfil them all, yet computer-parsable electronic contracts may allow such verification to be automated. In this chapter, we describe a conceptual framework and architecture specification in which normative business contracts can be electronically represented, verified, established, renewed, and so on. In particular, we aim to allow systems containing multiple contracts to be checked for conflicts and violations of business objectives. We illustrate the framework and architecture with an aerospace aftermarket example.

The Open Provenance Model Core Specification (v1.1)

The Open Provenance Model is a model of provenance that is designed to meet the following requirements: (1) To allow provenance information to be exchanged between systems, by means of a compatibility layer based on a shared provenance model. (2) To allow developers to build and share tools that operate on such a provenance model. (3) To define provenance in a precise, technology-agnostic manner. (4) To support a digital representation of provenance for any 'thing', whether produced by computer systems or not. (5) To allow multiple levels of description to coexist. (6) To define a core set of rules that identify the valid inferences that can be made on provenance representation. This document contains the specification of the Open Provenance Model (v1.1) resulting from a community-effort to achieve inter-operability in the Provenance Challenge series.