Directed deadline obligations in agent-based business contracts

There are B2B relationships that presume cooperation in contract enactment. This issue should be taken into account when modeling, for computational handling, contractual commitments through obligations. Deadline obligations have been modeled by considering that reaching the deadline without compliance brings up a violation. When modeling commitments in business contracts, directed obligations have been studied for identifying two agents: the obligation's bearer and the counterparty, who may claim for legal action in case of non-compliance. We argue in favor of a directed deadline obligation approach, taking inspiration on international legislation over trade procedures. Our proposal to model contractual obligations is based on authorizations granted in specific states of an obligation lifecycle model, which we formalize using temporal logic and implement in a rule-based system. The performance of a contractual relationship is supported by a model of flexible deadlines, which allow for further cooperation between autonomous agents. As a result, the decision-making space of agents concerning contractual obligations is enlarged and becomes richer. We discuss the issues that agents should take into account in this extended setting

Monitoring cooperative business contracts in an institutional environment

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. The proposed implementation is based on a rule-based forward chaining production system

Electronic institutions with normative environments for agent-based E-contracting

Tese de doutoramento. Engenharia Informática. Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto. 201

Flexible deadlines for directed obligations in agent-based business contracts

In B2B contract enactment, cooperation should be takeninto account when modeling contractual commitments throughobligations. We advocate a directed deadline obligation approach,taking inspiration on international legislation overtrade procedures. Our proposal is based on authorizationsgranted in specific states of an obligation lifecycle model.Flexible deadlines provide an additional level of cooperationbetween contractual agents. Moreover, agents increase theirdecision-making options concerning obligations

Contract related agents

Imperial Users onl

Designing compliant business processes with obligations and permissions. Business process management workshops.

The sequence and timing constraints on the activities in business processes are an important aspect of business process compliance. To date, these constraints are most often implicitly transcribed into control-flow-based process models. This implicit representation of constraints, however, complicates the verification, validation and reuse in business process design. In this paper, we investigate the use of temporal deontic assignments on activities as a means to declaratively capture the control-flow semantics that reside in business regulations and business policies. In particular, we introduce PENELOPE, a language to express temporal rules about the obligations and permissions in a business interaction, and an algorithm to generate compliant sequence-flow-based process models that can be used in business process design.

Using the event calculus for tracking the normative state of contracts

In this work, we have been principally concerned with the representation of contracts so that their normative state may be tracked in an automated fashion over their deployment lifetime. The normative state of a contract, at a particular time, is the aggregation of instances of normative relations that hold between contract parties at that time, plus the current values of contract variables. The effects of contract events on the normative state of a contract are specified using an XML formalisation of the Event Calculus, called ecXML. We use an example mail service agreement from the domain of web services to ground the discussion of our work. We give a characterisation of the agreement according to the normative concepts of: obligation, power and permission, and show how the ecXML representation may be used to track the state of the agreement, according to a narrative of contract events. We also give a description of a state tracking architecture, and a contract deployment tool, both of which have been implemented in the course of our work.

Interprovincial Barriers to Labour Mobility in Canada:Policy, Knowledge Gaps and Research Issues

The purpose of this paper is to identify the most important knowledge gaps on interprovincial barriers to labour mobility in Canada, and to shed some light on potential conceptual, methodological, and data issues associated with research in this area. Consequently, it provides an overview of the current state of play with respect to the most important issues relating to inter-provincial barriers to labour mobility within the Canadian internal market. The three main barriers to labour mobility in Canada, which are considered, are: residency requirements; certain practices regarding occupational licensing, certification and registration; and differences in how occupational qualifications are recognized. These are the main regulatory barriers that are to be removed or reduced under Chapter 7, the Labour Mobility Chapter of the Agreement on Internal Trade (AIT). It also reviews critically the recent relevant research in Canada and in some other jurisdictions (the United States, the European Union and Australia) on barriers to labour mobility. The paper finds that the most important knowledge gap concerns the extent of the regulatory barriers to labour mobility and their impacts and costs. It also concludes that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with the approach of mutual recognition being pursued in Canada to eliminate such regulatory barriers. However, while there has been a fair degree of success in Canada in achieving occupation-specific Mutual Recognition Agreements for occupational qualifications and reconciliation of differences in occupational standards, this progress has been too slow. Moreover, the functioning of the dispute resolution mechanism with respect to Chapter 7, is overly complex and inaccessible. The dispute resolution mechanism in the Alberta-B.C. Trade, Investment and Labour Mobility Agreement is stronger and simpler than that of the AIT, and definitely one to be considered as a model to improve the AIT.: labour, labour mobility, internal markets, internal trade