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.

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

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

Types of rights in interacting two-party systems : a formal analysis

Partially founded by UBACyT 20020090200116 and UBACyT 20020100200103.We present a formalization of Kanger’s types of rights in the context of interacting two-party systems, such as contracts. We show that in this setting basic rights such as claim, freedom, power and immunity can be expressed in terms of (possibly negated) permissions and obligations over presence or absense of actions, and that the set of atomic type rights is different from Kanger’s original proposal.peer-reviewe

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

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

Modeling control objectives for business process compliance

Business process design is primarily driven by process improvement objectives. However, the role of control objectives stemming from regulations and standards is becoming increasingly important for businesses in light of recent events that led to some of the largest scandals in corporate history. As organizations strive to meet compliance agendas, there is an evident need to provide systematic approaches that assist in the understanding of the interplay between (often conflicting) business and control objectives during business process design. In this paper, our objective is twofold. We will firstly present a research agenda in the space of business process compliance, identifying major technical and organizational challenges. We then tackle a part of the overall problem space, which deals with the effective modeling of control objectives and subsequently their propagation onto business process models. Control objective modeling is proposed through a specialized modal logic based on normative systems theory, and the visualization of control objectives on business process models is achieved procedurally. The proposed approach is demonstrated in the context of a purchase-to-pay scenario

FINDING INTERNATIONAL CONTRACTING OPPORTUNITIES: AI EXTENSIONS TO EDI

Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) offers a telecommunications infrastructure for inter-business communications. This paper proposes a particular use of that infra-structure to aid firms in identifying contracting opportunities, particularly where international trade is involved. We focus on two aspects of this problem: navigating the legal procedures relating to such contracts and managing the multi-lingual communications

Courts of Law and Unforeseen Contingencies

We study a contracting model with unforeseen contingencies in which the court is an active player. Ex-ante, the contracting parties cannot include the risky unforeseen contingencies in the contract they draw up. Ex-post the court observes whether an unforeseen contingency occurred, and decides whether to void or uphold the contract. If the contract is voided by the court, the parties can renegotiate a new agreement ex-post. There are two effects of a court that voids more contracts. The parties’ incentives to undertake relationship-specific investment are reduced, while the parties enjoy greater insurance against the unforeseen contingencies which the ex-ante contract cannot take into account. In this context, we are able to characterize fully the optimal decision rule for the court. The behavior of the optimal court is determined by the tradeoff between the need for incentives and the gains from insurance that voiding in some circumstances offers to the agents.Courts of Law, Unforeseen Contingencies, Precedents, Incentives, Insurance

Generating Procedural Controls to Facilitate Trade: The Role of Control in the Absence of Trust

Over the years, Trust has been recognized in the Bled community as a key enabling factor to stimulate Electronic Commerce. Authors have discussed formal aspects of trust, the role trust plays in the adoption of both B2B and B2C Electronic Commerce, as well as mechanisms to build trust and/or overcome the lack of it. This article first provides a brief overview of the Trust-related articles in the Bled eConference. It then focuses on one specific aspect of the facilitation of trade in absence of trust: the development of procedural controls that enable Electronic Commerce at arms’ length, summarizing the contributions of the authors on this theme at the Bled Conference since the early 1990s. The paper concludes with the authors’ current view on developing procedural controls, focusing on the design process itself, which is often a rather lengthy process consisting of trial-and -error. Here a more analytical approach is proposed to the identification of control requirements for inter-organizational procedures. The approach involves abstracting the process to identify its basic deontic elements. A model checking approach is then applied to identify needed controls