Monitorable Electronic Contract

An agent-based e-commerce environment is regarded as one of the most suitable open environments for electronic marketplaces. Because of agent?s autonomous, reactive and proactive features, agents can, on the one hand, act on behalf of their owner, and use individual strategies to increase the ability to do business; on the other hand, the problem of how to force agents to comply with prescribed behavior and to have effective monitoring is more complicated. Be able to monitor the contract at the fulfillment stage is the key for a reliable, flexible and efficient, realistic and acceptable e-market which should maintain the benefits among all contractual parties. At the contract fulfillment stage, all commitments and prescribed actions, clearly described at paper contracts between businesses, can be expressed as an electronic contract which can be generated and executed automatically. This paper first proposes a monitorable contract model which can be automatically monitored in business execution. Next, we demonstrate architecture which could dynamically monitor business processes using our monitorable e-contract model. Our approach not only supports the detection of actual violations but also pro-active detection imminent contract violations. A multi-party case is used to explain our approach.