Automating Support for E-Business Contracts

If e-business contracts are to be widely used, they need to be supported by the IT infrastructure of the organizations concerned. This implies that the interactions between systems in different organizations must be guided by the contract and there must be sufficiently strong checks and balances to ensure that the contract is in fact obeyed. This includes facilities for the unbiased monitoring of correct behaviour and the reporting of exceptions. One of the ways to provide this support is to generate it directly from the agreed contract. This paper considers the steps necessary to provide sufficient automation in the support and checking of e-Business contracts for them to offer efficiency gains and so to become widely used. It focuses on the role of models, taking a model-driven approach to development and discussing both the source and target models and the transformational pathways needed to support the contract-based business processes.