Samuil Angelov, Paul Grefen

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Automated Contract Handling

• Samuil Angelov, Paul Grefen
• Computer Science Department
• Information Systems Group
• University of Twente

• sangelov_at_cs.utwente.nl
• www.cs.utwente.nl/sangelov

• grefen_at_cs.utwente.nl
• www.cs.utwente.nl/grefen

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Overview

• Context
• B2B contracts
• Electronic contracts
• Automation with electronic contracts
• Research goal
• Research steps
• Questions

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Context

• Business Contracts
• Business-to-Business domain
• Service consumer/supplier paradigm
• Dynamic partner relations
• Classical and neoclassical contracts

A contract is a legally enforceable agreement, in
which two or more parties commit to certain
obligations in return for certain rights Rei89
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B2B Contracts

• Contracts
• guarantee rights
• prescribe obligations
• increase mutual trust
• form the foundation of business relations in a
  market
• Contract problems human beings
• incur high costs for contract establishment and
  management
• slow for dynamic and rapidly changing business
  situations

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Automation Through Electronic Contracts

• Electronic contracts should
• lower establishment and management costs
• speed up and improve contract establishment and
  management
• Offer new opportunities
• extend company reach (e.g. no geographical
  restrictions)
• micro-contracting

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What to Automate With Electronic Contracts?

• Contracting phases

Informational
Pre-contractual
Contractual
Enactment

• Automate contract establishment
• negotiation,elaboration
• Automate contract enactment
• service execution, contract management

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What Is New With Electronic Contracts?

• New data to be included in contracts
• New machine readable representation is required
• New business set up
• dynamic and flexible relations
• faster execution of processes

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Contract Contents

• Generally
• Exchanged values
• Service to be delivered
• Reward
• Provisions
• Prescribe behavior, procedures and guarantees for
  certain situations
• Define terms, conditions, formulas, etc.

Provisions
Values
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Automation With Electronic Contracts(Contract
Establishment)

• Elaboration of contracts must be automated to a
  certain extent.
• Contracts should be automatically processable
• Structuring of an electronic contract
• natural language
• formal language
• contract template

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Automation With Electronic Contracts (Contract
Enactment 1)

• Specification and alignment of activities
  performed by the parties
• formal specification
• appropriate representation in the e-contract
• An enactment architecture that handles contract
  enactment

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Automation With Electronic Contracts (Contract
Enactment - 2)

• Views on process specifications

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Three-level Framework
logical process
logical process
service consumer
service supplier
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Automation With Electronic Contracts (Contract
Enactment 3, Management)

• Parallel to the contract execution module,
• contract management is required.
• Contract monitoring
• monitoring of service delivery
• monitoring of provisions
• Notification of parties
• Contract enforcement
• Process control

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Automation With Electronic Contracts

• Simplified contract enactment architecture

Monitor
Notifier

Enactor
Mapper
Internal Enactment Architecture
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Main Research Goal

• To elaborate a contract enactment architecture
  that allows sophisticated contract enactment,
  with flexible contract management (based on
  cooperation support services).
• To elaborate the required mappings, between the
  external and logical processes.

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Research Steps - 1

• Work done
• Extensive survey over the project, papers and
  standards in this field
• A framework for electronic contracting support
• Work in progress
• A contracting process model

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Research Steps - 2

• Future work
• Refinement of the contract enactment processes
• A contract model, contract language
• Identification of contract enactment requirements
  on the contracting processes and contract
  content.
• General contracting architecture, contract
  enactment architecture with flexible contract
  management

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Standards

• ebXML
• WSDL
• WSFL
• Standards aim at fundamental problems.
  Contracting is a special case.

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Questions
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Contacts
Samuil Angelov www.cs.utwente.nl/sangelov
Paul Grefen www.cs.utwente.nl/grefen
University of Twente