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Acknowledgement and Legal notice / Disclaimer |
The
CONTRACT project is co-funded by the European Commission under the 6th
Framework Programme for RTD with project number FP6-034418.
Notwithstanding
this fact, this web site and its content reflects only the project
consortium's / authors' views.The European Commission is not
responsible for its contents, or liable for the possible effects of any
usage of the information contained therein.
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Theoretical Framework for Contract Based Computing |
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One of the objectives of CONTRACT was to bring together cutting edge theories from the domain of agent technology, Semantics of communication, advanced model checking techniques, Web Services architectures and distributed application modelling to produce a workable framework for contract based computing.
The framework models distributed software application environments as open systems of automated components which can interact with one another, provide services to one another and make commitments to one another in terms of contracts. The models and procedures comprising the CONTRACT framework and architecture are shown in the figure below. Each level in the figure above provides support for the components below it. Arrows indicate direct interactions between components.
The primary component of this is the framework itself (depicted at the top of the figure), which is the conceptual structure used to describe a contract-based system (including the contracts themselves, the clauses, the agents to which they apply and the roles they play) and provides a sound semantic basis for components and interactions in a contractual environment.
The architecture is an instantiation of the contract management aspects of the framework: a set of service-oriented middleware and design patterns to support management of electronic contracts. A number of useful operations may be performed by the architecture on the framework specification of a given application.
- First, off-line verification mechanisms can check whether the contracts to be established obey particular properties, such as being achievable, given the possible states the world can reach.
- From this, and the contracts themselves, it is possible to determine which states are critical to monitor during execution to ensure appropriate behaviour. A critical state of a contract-based system with regard to an obligation essentially indicates whether the obligation is fulfilled or fulfillable, e.g. achieved, failed, in danger of not being fulfilled, etc.
- The framework specification can aid in determining which processes are suitable for the administration of the electronic contracts through their lifetimes, including establishment, updating, termination, renewal, and so on. In particular such processes also include observation of the system, so that contractual obligations can be enforced or otherwise effectively managed; these processes depend on the critical states mentioned earlier. The selection of a process typically requires that certain agents take on specific roles. These administrative roles in turn require that the agents have certain capabilities, which are in turn instantiated by specific components. Furthermore, only once these administrative processes exist may contract documents actually be used and enforced by the system.
The theoretical framework therefore provides a baseline for potential realisation in a wide range of different implementation technologies and sound basis for reasoning about activities in contract based application environments. Both the framework and the architecture are fully instantiated by the rest of results of the project: the CONTRACT Web Service architecture, the CONTRACT language and the CONTRACT verification, monitoring and analysis support tools.
Further reading
- CONTRACT deliverable D2.1 Contract Based Electronic Business Systems State of the Art
- CONTRACT deliverable D2.2 Contract based Electronic Business Systems Theoretical Framework document
- Oren, Nir and Panagiotidi, Sofia and Vazquez-Salceda, Javier and Modgil, Sanjay and Luck, Michael and Miles, Simon (2008) Towards a Formalisation of Electronic Contracting Environments. In: Proceedings of Coordination, Organization, Institutions and Norms in Agent Systems, the International Workshop at AAAI 2008, Chicago.
- Miles, Simon and Oren, Nir and Luck, Michael and Modgil, Sanjay and Meneguzzi, Felipe and Faci, Nora and Holt, Camden and Vickers, Gary. Electronic Business Contracts between Services. In: Handbook of Research on P2P and Grid Systems for Service-Oriented Computing: Models, Methodologies and Applications. IGI Global.
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Copyright 2006 - 2009, IST Contract Project. All rights reserved.
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Start Date / Duration |
The project started on the 1st of September, 2006 and finished on July 31st 2009.
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European Commission Framework 6 IST Project
