Authors:
Henrique Lopes Cardoso
and
Eugénio Oliveira
Affiliation:
Universidade do Porto, Portugal
Keyword(s):
Electronic contract monitoring, Contractual obligations, Deadlines, Rules
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Artificial Intelligence
;
Artificial Intelligence and Decision Support Systems
;
Coordination in Multi-Agent Systems
;
Enterprise Information Systems
;
Informatics in Control, Automation and Robotics
;
Intelligent Control Systems and Optimization
;
Intelligent Social Agents and Distributed Artificial Intelligence Applications
;
Knowledge Engineering
;
Knowledge Engineering and Ontology Development
;
Knowledge-Based Systems
;
Knowledge-Based Systems Applications
;
Software Engineering
;
Symbolic Systems
Abstract:
The automation of B2B processes is currently a hot research topic. In particular, multi-agent systems have been used to address this arena, where agents can represent enterprises in an interaction environment, automating tasks such as contract negotiation and enactment. Contract monitoring tools are becoming more important as the level of automation of business relationships increase. When business is seen as a joint activity that aims at pursuing a common goal, the successful execution of the contract benefits all involved parties, and thus each of them should try to facilitate the compliance of their partners. Taking into account these concerns and inspecting international legislation over trade procedures, in this paper we present an approach to model contractual obligations: obligations are directed from bearers to counterparties and have flexible deadlines. We formalize the semantics of such obligations using temporal logic, and we provide rules that allow for monitoring them. T
he proposed implementation is based on a rule-based forward chaining production system.
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