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The business case for B2B e-contracting
Abstract
Business-to-business e-contracting has gained attention in recent years as a way to improve traditional paper contracting. However, a complete framework specifying the aspects of improvement of traditional paper contracting and the new opportunities introduced by e-contracting still does not exist. Past and current projects in e-contracting have relied on common sense and ad hoc reasoning to motivate the introduction of e-contracting to business. This paper fills the existing gap, describing the business foundation for the employment of e-contracting. A complete and structured description of the improvements and the new business opportunities introduced by e-contracting are presented. This research work allows companies to clearly identify the benefits that can be achieved in their business context by the introduction of e-contracting. We use two business scenarios to illustrate the new contracting opportunities for business parties.
... One way to implement e-contracting is by simply digitizing existing paper contracts and using fast communication channels for contract establishment (e.g., e-mail). We call this type of e-contracting ''shallow e-contracting" (Angelov and Grefen, 2004b). Shallow e-contracting improves the efficiency of the contracting process by reducing the time and costs for communication. ...
... The second way to support e-contracting is by implementing a dedicated e-contracting system that can fully (or to a great extent) automate the e-contract establishment, enactment, and management. We call this type of e-contracting ''deep e-contracting" (Angelov and Grefen, 2004b). Deep e-contracting eliminates (or significantly decreases) human participation in contracting processes. ...
... Deep e-contracting allows, for example, the support of contracting in the latest possible moment (just-in-time contracting) and of contracting of micro business relationships (micro-contracting). An elaborate discussions on the values introduced by deep e-contracting is presented in Angelov and Grefen (2004b). A number of business domains allow high automation of contracting relationships (e.g. ...
Business-to-business e-contracting aims at automating the contracting process between companies. It improves the efficiency of the contracting process and enables the introduction of new business models that can be supported by companies. For the development of an e-contracting system, an architecture is required that describes the system components and the communication channels between them. This paper presents a reference architecture for the development of e-contracting systems. The architecture is designed on the basis of a requirement analysis of e-contracting systems. Established architectural principles are used in its design. The architecture can serve as a foundation in the analysis and design of concrete architectures of e-contracting systems. Furthermore, it can be used as a standardization model that facilitates system integration and communication of ideas. Its value for both software architects and business professionals makes it an important tool in the analysis and implementation of e-contracting systems.
... Depending on the level of automation pursued in e-contract enactment and management, e-contracts can be seen only as digitalized paper contracts [16] (i.e., they have only a human readable representation and cannot be automatically interpreted, enacted or managed by an e-contracting system) or as a "software reification" of paper contracts [19] (i.e., they can be automatically interpreted, enacted or managed by the supporting e-contracting systems). We call the first type of e-contracting "shallow e-contracting" and the second type "deep e-contracting" [3]. In this paper, we concentrate on e-contracts used in deep e-contracting, i.e., e-contracts that have a machine-interpretable content representation and that can contain additional software related specifications required for their fully or partially automatic enactment and management. ...
... Furthermore, in certain domains (e.g. advertising [3]), it can lead to a shift from long-lasting and static to highly dynamic business relations. ...
... Although we ignore additional computational effort required for checking, reading, and storing of e-contracts, we can conclude that the simultaneous update of 1000 e-contracts can take several seconds at each party side. While 1000 contracts is a huge number for traditional paper contracts, due to the support of micro business relations, in e-contracting this number will be common even for small businesses [3]. As an event that occurs can affect many e-contracts, we can envision the need of updating huge number of e-contracts at the same time. ...
Business-to-business electronic contracts provide a specification of the agreed value exchange and guarantee legal protection to companies during electronic trading relations. Important features that distinguish e-contracts from traditional paper contracts are the possibilities for automatic establishment and enactment, the more detailed e-contract content specification and the frequency of e-contract content updating. In this paper, we discuss these e-contract features and the technology requirements to which they lead. We describe two conceptual architectures for the support of updates in digitally signed e-contracts. We demonstrate that the straightforward approach is inefficient and therefore inadequate for supporting high update rates in an automated, dynamic, communication-intensive contract enactment environment. The second approach that we describe allows companies to handle e-contract updates in a more efficient and simplified manner. It introduces a new type of Trusted Third Party that can be used for the support of e-contract updates. This paper provides the required conceptual foundation for the construction of an important part of an e-contract management system.
... One way to implement e-contracting is by simply digitizing existing paper contracts and using fast communication channels for contract establishment (e.g., e-mail). We call this type of e-contracting "shallow econtracting" (Angelov and Grefen, 2004). Shallow e-contracting improves the efficiency of the contracting process by reducing the time and costs for communication. ...
... way to support e-contracting is by implementing a dedicated e-contracting system that can fully (or to a great extent) automate the e-contract establishment, enactment, and management. We call this type of e-contracting "deep e-contracting" (Angelov and Grefen, 2004). Deep e-contracting eliminates human participation in contracting processes (or significantly decreases it). ...
... We call these new models the "paradigms of e-contracting". In our previous work, we have identified five main paradigms of deep e-contracting (Angelov and Grefen, 2004), namely, the micro-contracting (ji-contracting), just-in-time-contracting (i-contracting), precision-contracting (jt-contracting), enactment-contracting (e-contracting), and management-contracting (y-contracting) paradigms. The micro-contracting paradigm represents the opportunity contracts to be customized on a mass scale. ...
Business-to-business electronic contracting has gained attention in recent years as a way to improve traditional contracting practices as well as a paradigm that allows the support of new business models in an enterprise. This paper presents the business case of the Dutch news medium Telegraaf for contracting of advertising spots in its on-line edition. We discuss replacement of current contracting practices with advanced electronic contracting that will allow Telegraaf to highly automate its contract establishment, enactment, and management processes. This high level of automation presents an opportunity to Telegraaf for organizational restructuring and for the support of new business models that improve the competitiveness of the company. Full Text at Springer, may require registration or fee
... Uma abordagem eletrônica para contratos torna possível o estabelecimento de acordos a custos mais baixos, em um período de tempo menor e sem restrições geográficas[45]. De acordo com Angelov & Grefen[46], os benefícios que podem ser obtidos são de três tipos de valores: financeiros, estratégicos e de processo. Os valores estratégicos incluem: casamento de estratégias, vantagem competitiva, informação de gerência e arquitetura de tecnologia de informação estratégica. ...
... Os valores de processo incluem: qualidade, tempo do ciclo de vida, agilidade e adaptabilidade. Apesar desse grande conjunto de benefícios, em[46] são apresentados também alguns riscos associados ao uso de contratos eletrônicos, tais como riscos políticos, de negócio, do ponto de vista legal, de padronização, de reestruturação interna e de segurança.Além dos aspectos apresentados nos parágrafos anteriores, há ainda os aspectos de legalidade associados a contratos eletrônicos[17]. De acordo com esses aspectos, contratos devem definir, por exemplo, os procedimentos legais para o caso de quebra do acordo e para a necessidade de arbitragem como a definição de foro apropriado. ...
... Nowadays, to stay competitive, companies engage in highly dynamic and complex business collaborations. This dynamism and complexity requires improvement of the efficiency and effectiveness of business collaborations, which has led to the usage of information technology to support the contracting process and to the transformation of paper contracts into electronic contracts [1]. E-contracts contain the terms and conditions of the collaboration agreed by the parties in a digital, machine interpretable format. ...
... E-contracting research deals with the process of establishment and enactment of electronic contracts and determining their content to support digital collaborations between parties [1], [2], [19]. ...
Business collaborations have become highly dynamic and flexible. "Black-box" services are gradually replaced by services where service providers not only expose the underlying processes but also allow some monitoring of their executions. In this paper, we explore the next step where the consumers can exercise some control over the process execution. We specify a set of control primitives that can be used to exert control on activities before, during and after their execution and on the complete process itself. Our design approach allows the consumer to observe the state of execution of the process and its activities, control their execution and decide how to deal with unsuccessful executions. We describe the support that must be provided in the internal process specification of the service provider for the control options. We illustrate our approach with an example from the healthcare domain.
... However, the benefits for a company from such electronic representation are usually low. We call this type of e-contracting "shallow e-contracting" [Ang04]. Electronic contracting that provides means for a high level of automation of the contract establishment, contract management, and enactment processes presents significantly more opportunities to the trading parties. ...
... In Appendix A, we provide a sample, XML based, e-contract specification language that satisfies the requirements identified in this report. In previous work [Ang04], we have identified five main paradigms of e-contracting, i.e., micro-, just-in-time-, precision-, enactment-, and management-contracting. Each paradigm is a specific new business opportunity introduced by e-contracting. ...
Electronic contracts are the instrument to govern electronic trading relationships between business parties. A number of efforts exist in both the academic and industrial worlds to define an e-contract specification language. However, these efforts lack either universality or completeness. The main reasons for this are the complexity and diversity of business contracts. For the definition of a common, complete e-contract specification language, the identification of requirements on an e-contract language is an underlying prerequisite. In this paper, we present the requirements on an e-contract specification language. The identified requirements are based on the investigation of traditional business contracts from different business domains (business pull aspects), the technology aspects of e-contracts (technology push aspects), and the existing research efforts on this topic (research aspects). The results presented in this paper allow definition of e-contract specification languages that satisfy the requirements imposed by both business and technology.
... Nowadays, to stay competitive, companies engage in highly dynamic and complex business collaborations. This dynamism and complexity requires improvement of the efficiency and effectiveness of business collaborations, which has led to the usage of information technology to support the contracting process and to the transformation of paper contracts into electronic contracts [1]. E-contracts contain the terms and conditions of the collaboration agreed by the parties in a digital, machine interpretable format. ...
... E-contracting research deals with the process of establishment and enactment of electronic contracts and determining their content to support digital collaborations between parties [1], [2], [11]. The work presented in this paper complements the research in e-contracting by extending e-contracts with the allowed I-options. ...
E-contracts express the rights and obligations of parties through a formal, digital representation of the contract provisions.
In process intensive relationships, e-contracts contain business processes that a party promises to perform for the counter
party, optionally allowing monitoring of the execution of the promised processes. In this paper, we describe an approach in
which the counter party is allowed to control the process execution. This approach will lead to more flexible and efficient
business relations which are essential in the context of modern, highly dynamic and complex collaborations among companies.
We present a specification of the process controls available to the consumer and their support in the private process specification
of the provider.
... Nowaday, Web Services are being served by several Service Providers and many cases occur, where various Web Services can gratify operational needs of a Service Requester, but what resolves the matter of selecting the finest Web Service for Service Requester is the QoS level of Web Services. With affirmed QoS, customers get "what they really expect for their paid electronic solutions" [10] while Service Providers "[…] can prepare effective resources planning and avoid from over-committing the resources to certain services" [11]. "Quality-of-Service as a set of non-functional attributes that may impact the quality of the service offered by a Web Services" + [12] 2 "A set of non-functional attributes of the entities used in the path from a Web Services repository to the Service Consumer, who relies on the Web Services' ability to satisfy its stated or implied needs in an end-to-end fashion" + [13] 3 "A whole range of techniques that match the needs of service requestors with those of the Service Provider's based on the network resources available, it refer to nonfunctional properties of Web Service such as performance, reliability, availability, and security" + [14] 4 "The non-functional QoS facet describes how good the service performs the tasks, this leads towards the aspect of quality" + [15] 5 "QoS information is used for computing the quality degree of candidate Web Service" + [16] 6 QoS is a measure for how well a service serves the customer + [17] 7 "It is an agreement between the Service Consumer and the Service Provider, which is used to express the level of quality that is accepted by both Service Provider and Service Consumer" + [18] For the better understanding of QoS for SOA-based Web Services, the responsibilities of entities in Web Service Model must be discussed from QoS perspective. ...
As the espousal pace of Web Service technology has increased, so does the requirement for efficient Web Service development, discovery, and composition mechanism is obvious. In our opinion the efficient Web Service development can be achieved by considering two facets: a) Quality Attributes along with the functional requirements of Web Services and b) foundational architecture of Web Services i.e. Service-Oriented Architecture. For Web Services, operated over the heterogeneous widespread network, the Quality Attributes are of principal importance when selecting one out of many. Till date several Quality Attribute and their criteria have been published in literature for SOA based Web Services but none of them discussing Quality Attributes, their available different system of measurements, tradeoffs, tools, and standards all together. Here, this paper presents a Systematic Literature Review on Quality-of-Service for Service Oriented Architecture-based Web Services by addressing some significant research questions with a fine review protocol. This paper reviews the varied definitions, metrics, issues and challenges, standards and future directions of Quality Attributes of SOA based Web Services.
... Businesses have demanded more agility from service providers, which creates a competition among them that benefits customers. Not surprisingly, the number of service contracts has grown significantly (Angelov and Grefen, 2004), and companies usually have to switch between different partners to leverage the best trading opportunities at any given moment. ...
... In this context, and with the appearance of computers, contracts started becoming active when they were represented as computer formulas, spreadsheets or other active documents. A complete and structured description of the improvements and the new business opportunities introduced by e-contracting are presented in [52]. ...
... Every service comes with a contract between customer and provider to ensure both parties understand the level of service quality that they should respectively expect and provide. In addition, contract also gives benefits to both customers and providers (Liu et al. 2001) in such a way that customers get what they expect for their paid electronic solutions (Angelov and Grefen 2004), while providers can prepare effective resources planning and avoid from over-committing the resources to certain services (Allenotor and Thulasiram 2008). This contract is known as Service Level Agreement (SLA) which contains specifications of functional and non-functional QoS. ...
Monitoring Quality of Service (QoS) compliance is an important procedure in web service environment. It determines whether users’ expectations are met, and becomes the vital factor for them to decide whether to continue paying for the service or not. The monitoring is performed by checking the actual services performance against the QoS stated in Service Level Agreement (SLA). In relation to that, the need for monitoring vague QoS specifications in SLA has become more apparent nowadays. This paper reviews the published literature on web services QoS monitoring. A total of 60 selected articles were systematically analyzed. There were 23 of the articles selected through restrictive search criteria while the other 37 were selected based on unrestrictive search criteria. The review shows that little evidence exists on monitoring vague QoS specifications of web services. Providing ability for monitoring QoS that is specified vaguely in SLA could give new insights and implications to web services field. This paper concludes with some recommended future works to construct the theory and perform the empirical research.
... Previous works in electronic commerce and enterprise computing have dealt with the problem of managing contracts. The field of e-contracting [1] deals with the automation of contracting practices and it is mainly tailored for the B2B case. The direction that is most relevant to the present work is the verification and monitoring of real world contracts. ...
Considering a broad definition for service contracts (beyond web services and software, e.g. airline tickets and insurance policies), we tackle the challenges of building a high performance broker in which contracts are both specified and queried through their temporal behavior. The temporal dimension, in conjunction with traditional relational attributes, enables our system to better address difficulties arising from the great deal of information regarding the temporal interaction of the various events cited in contracts (e.g. "No refunds are allowed after a reschedule of the flight, which can be requested only before any flight leg has been used"). On the other hand, querying big repositories of temporal specifications poses many interesting challenges. In this paper, we introduce two distinct and complementary optimization techniques that enable our system to scale the evaluation of a novel and theoretically sound notion of permission of a temporal property by a service contract. Our notion of permission is inspired by previous work on model checking but, given the specific characteristic of our problem, does not reduce to it. We evaluate experimentally our implementation, showing that it scales well with both the number and the complexity of the contracts.
... The levels of automation and accessibility are also relationship-specific attributes for transactions. Angelov and Grefen (2004) identified two forms of e-contracting based on the level of automation of the contracting process: deep and shallow e-contracting. For example, e-mailing a contract (or an order) is shallow e-contracting because of the level of direct involvement of people and, as a consequence, no significant change in the business process is required. ...
This paper systematically reviews previous studies of trust from social, economic and technological perspectives and develops a holistic framework for trust, which can be used to analyse the establishment and maintenance of trust in online transactions, and identify the mechanisms that can be used to increase trust. Trust plays a crucial role in the formation of dependent relationships represented by online transactions, and a holistic treatment of trust is necessary because of the gap that exists between the developments in information systems and our understanding of their social and economic implications, and the impact on the perceived trust of the transacting parties. This review enables us to depict an online transaction through its attributes and context, and systematically map these to identified trust antecedents. The key components and processes of the framework are outlined, and three strands of empirical work are discussed to develop it further. The framework highlights the critical role of institutions in the establishment and maintenance of trust in online transactions, which informs the development of e‐commerce and e‐business platforms and the underpinning information systems, and facilitates the establishment of mechanisms to induce additional institutions to increase trust in online transactions.
... Previous works in electronic commerce and enterprise computing have dealt with the problem of managing contracts. The field of e-contracting [2] deals with the automation of contracting practices and it is mainly tailored for the B2B case. The direction that is most relevant to the present work is the verification and monitoring of real world contracts. ...
Considering a broad definition for service contracts (beyond web services and software, e.g. airline tickets and insurance policies), we tackle the challenges of building a high performance broker in which contracts are both specified and queried through their temporal behavior. The temporal dimension, in conjunction with traditional relational attributes, enables our system to better address difficulties arising from the great deal of information regarding the temporal interaction of the various events cited in contracts (e.g. "No refunds are allowed after a reschedule of the flight, which can be requested only before any flight leg has been used"). On the other hand, querying large repositories of temporal specifications poses an interesting indexing challenge. In this paper, we introduce two distinct and complementary indexing techniques that enable our system to scale the evaluation of a novel and theoretically sound notion of permission of a temporal query by a service contract. Our notion of permission is inspired by previous work on model checking but, given the specific characteristic of our problem, does not reduce to it. We evaluate experimentally our implementation, showing that it scales well with both the number and the complexity of the contracts.
... A Service Level Agreement [7] is a formal negotiated agreement between a Service Provider and a Service Customer (the service requester). The use of electronic contracts with automated support for their management allows an increase of effectiveness and efficiency in contract processing, opening new possibilities for interaction among parties [2,3]. ...
The advent of information and communication technology has changed the nature of business-to-business interaction among organizations.
The use of electronic contracts with automated support for their management allows an increase of effectiveness and efficiency
in contract processing, opening new possibilities for interaction among parties. Service Providers and their customers negotiate
utility based Service Level Agreements (SLA) to determine costs and penalties based on the achieved performance levels. The
global QoS to be provided to the end customer can be strongly affected by any violation on each single SLA. In order to prevent
such violations, SLAs need to be flexible and dynamically adaptable. In this work we focus on the WS-Agreement specification,
a Web Service protocol to establish agreements on the QoS level to be guaranteed in the provision of a service. We propose
to enhance the flexibility of its approach by integrating new functionality to the protocol that enable the parties of a WS-Agreement
to re-negotiate and modify its terms during the service provision.
... The agreement to offer certain visibility over the process execution has to be part of the contract stipulating the terms and goals of the business relation. Electronic contracts (e-contracts) contain the terms and conditions of the collaboration agreed by the parties in a digital, machine-interpretable format 5 . They specify the external process agreed to be visible to the counter-parties and to be subject to monitoring 4 (discussed next). ...
Nowadays, business collaborations have to be highly dynamic and flexible to allow companies to operate efficiently and effectively in complex and volatile markets. To increase the business agility of service consumers, it is fundamental that service providers enhance the visibility of parts of their collaborative processes. Service providers are required to release both the process structures of the services offered and their status during execution. To further increase the flexibility of business collaborations, certain control over the process execution has to be offered to service consumers. In this paper, we present a framework for the support of process control in cross-organizational settings. We specify the control primitives that can be used to exert control on activities and processes before, during and after their executions. These primitives empower service consumers to postpone activity and process executions, bypass minor activities, repeat their executions, etc. We describe an approach to the support of these control primitives by service providers. We demonstrate the application of our framework with a case study from the healthcare domain. A proof-of-concept prototype implementation based on Web service technology is presented.
... A Service Level Agreement [8] is though a formal negotiated agreement between a Service Provider and its customer (the service requester). When a customer requests a service to a provider, an SLA is negotiated and a contract is drawn up [3]. The contract involves parameters, both functional and not functional, relating to the service to be provided. ...
In a SOA environment services are implemented on top of resources across different administrative domains, in which IT infrastructure and internal resources are managed according to autonomous policies. Service Providers and their customers negotiate utility based Service Level Agreements (SLAs) to determine costs and penalties based on the achieved performance levels. In B2B scenarios where several service providers are involved in the composition of a service, and each of them plays both the parts of provider and customer, several one-to-one SLAs need to be signed. In such a rigid context the global QoS of the final service can be strongly affected by any violation on each single SLA. In order to prevent such violations, SLAs need to flexible during service provision. The WS-Agreement specification, developed by the Global Grid Forum, is a Web Service protocol to establish agreements on the QoS level to be guaranteed in the provision of a service. The committed WS-Agreement can not be modified during service provision and is effective until all activities pertaining to it are finished or until one of the signing parties decides to terminate it. In this work we focus on this specification and propose to enhance the flexibility of its approach. We integrate new functionality to the protocol that enable the parties of a WS-Agreement to re-negotiate and modify its terms during the service provision, and show how a typical scenario of service composition can benefit from our proposal.
The unprecedented advancements witnessed in the field of information and communication technology over the last couple of years are significantly affecting the nature and magnitude of B2B interactions, as well as their operational effectiveness and efficiency. However, interaction and contracting among global enterprises continued to be challenged by the difference of laws, authentication requirements, and endorsement constrains. With the rapidly increasing proliferation of mobile devices, wireless communication systems, and advanced computer networking protocols, the deployment of electronic contracting platforms and applications has provided many opportunities to enterprises; dictated new axioms for doing business; and gave rise to new paradigms. Together with the increasing institutional transformations, technological advancements motivated businesses to engage in an interactive process of contract formulation and negotiation.
With the advent of service computing paradigm, Web service QoS prediction has become a necessity to support high quality service recommendation and reliable Web-based system building. However, the inherent data sparsity issue and potentially strong but inconspicuous relation between users or Web services and their neighborhoods under the context of region information are overlooked in previous studies. In this paper, we propose a unified matrix factorization model by capturing the influences of region contexts from both user and service sides in an integrated way. Different from previous researches, our approach capitalizes on the advantages of latent feature and neighborhood approaches systematically so as to achieve accurate QoS prediction. Experimental results have shown the proposed approach outperforms its competitive methods with respect to accuracy efficiently, thereby demonstrating the positive effect that incorporation of explicit region context can have on alleviating the concerned data sparsity issue.
Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) has become the prominent distributed computing paradigm nowadays. One of the technologies that enable the running of SOA is web services. In its nature of similar to peer-to-peer communication, web services involve customer who requests for the service and provider who provides the service. As a result, web services implementation requires a contract agreement so that both parties will get the value for money they invested. The objective of this paper is to present the literature review on monitoring for violations of this contract. Based on the literature study, this paper proposes a monitoring model to monitor compliance of vague non-functional requirements specified in the contract. The proposed research implies more realistic way of describing web services non-functional requirements and uncomplicated requirements specification as the model is focusing on inexperienced users.
Strategic transformation of the enterprise means system changes, with the upgrade management as the foundation, the capital management as the means, to cultural transformation as the core, to promote industrial upgrading to the strategic target, the improvement of the quality of the staff overall for security can be achieved by traditional enterprise to accord with the new economic development requirements and industry development trend of modern enterprises to change. This paper, analysis the kodak and Fuji development process,propose the enterprise strategy of the economic technology innovation and consumption of the experience under the Electronic-economic business affairs.
Knowledge deriving from owned information and experience is an asset that has begun to be recognised by organizations of various scales as a marketable product. In previous work we have developed a system that facilitated the formal description of knowledge possessed by an organization, so that external entities could search in it and request it. In this chapter we extend on that work in a couple of ways: i) we develop a mediator system enabling the search to concurrently consider multiple possible sources of information and ii) we allow for the query to posed on a more natural way by expressing the information needs of the requestor rather than by describing the information items that may satisfy these needs. Such a system opens the way for fully automated problem based online information brokering, which is expected to be the next trend in the knowledge market.
E-contracting implies pre-order electronic interaction between customers and suppliers engaging in business transactions. This paper examines electronic contracting from an interorganizational perspective. It derives a collaboration process architecture for contracting in retail and industrial companies and outlines key design decisions concerning a process-supporting system architecture. A case from the retail industry illustrates major problems with paper-based contracting processes currently practiced by most companies and emphasizes the usefulness and applicability of the developed framework in industrial practice. Finally, we present a research agenda towards a holistic framework providing support for retail and industry companies in deploying e-contracting solutions.
The increasing adoption of service oriented architectures across different administrative domains, forces service providers to use effective mechanisms and strategies of resource management in order for them to be able to guarantee the quality levels their customers demands during service provisioning. Service level agreements (SLA) are the most common mechanism used to establish agreements on the quality of a service (QoS) between a service provider and a service consumer. The WS-Agreement specification, developed by the Open Grid Forum, is a Web Service protocol to establish agreements on the QoS level to be guaranteed in the provision of a service. The committed agreement cannot be modified during service provision and is effective until all activities pertaining to it are finished or until one of the signing party decides to terminate it. In B2B scenarios where several service providers are involved in the composition of a service, and each of them plays both the parts of provider and customer, several one-to-one SLAs need to be signed. In such a rigid context the global QoS of the final service can be strongly affected by any violation on each single SLA. In order to prevent such violations, SLAs need to adapt to any possible needs that might come up during service provision. In this work we focus on the WS-Agreement specification and propose to enhance the flexibility of its approach. We integrate new functionality to the protocol that enable the parties of a WS-Agreement to re-negotiate and modify its terms during the service provision, and show how a typical scenario of service composition can benefit from our proposal.
Effectiveness in the process of creating virtual organizations (VO) is an important pre-condition for having a truly dynamic VOs, in response to collaboration opportunities in fast changing market contexts. A realistic approach to materialize agility in VO creation is defined under the assumption of a VO Breeding Environment (VBE), that guarantees the preparedness of its members to quickly get engaged in collaboration processes. After a survey of past approaches and a characterization of the VBE concept, a discussion of the process and suggested functionalities towards a VO creation framework are presented in this context. Finally a list of supporting tools is described and future research challenges are pointed out.
Outsourcing of business processes is crucial for organizations to be effective, efficient and flexible. In fast changing markets, dynamic outsourcing is required, in which business relationships are established and enacted on-the-fly in an adaptive, fine-grained way. This requires automated means for the establishment of outsourcing relationships and for the enactment of services performed in these relationships. Due to wide industry support and their model of loose coupling, Web Services have become the mechanism of choice to interconnect organizations. This paper analyzes Web Services support for the dynamic process outsourcing paradigm. We discuss contract-based outsourcing to define requirements, introduce the Web Services framework and investigate the match between the two. We observe that the framework requires further support for cross-organizational business processes and mechanisms for contracting, QoS management and transaction management. We suggest an approach to fill these gaps based on a business process support application layer implemented on Web Service technology.
Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a recently emerged enterprise architecture promising to perform business processes efficiently and effectively. Service Providers and their customers negotiate utility based Service Level Agreements (SLA) to determine costs and penalties based on the achieved performance levels. In this work, we propose to enhance the flexibility of the WS-Agreement specification, a Web Service protocol to establish agreements on the QoS level to be guaranteed in the provision of a service. This protocol is generally aimed to be a "one-shot" interaction, i.e., the WS-Agreement is created based on a creation offer; the created agreement can not be modified and is effective until all activities pertaining to the agreement are finished or until one of the signing party decides to terminate it. Our main contribution provides for the integration of new functionality to the protocol that enable the parties of a WS-Agreement to re-negotiate and modify its terms during the service provision.
This paper examines the support needed for dynamically creating and managing contract-driven virtual enterprises. Our approach to virtual enterprises views contracts as the central theme that runs throughout the enterprises' life cycle and touches upon all major aspects thereof.A Contract Framework integrates the concepts and entities necessary for the contract-centred support. A combination of Virtual Market technology and an advanced Matchmaking Engine (MME) facilitates the creation of service markets where matching business partners can find each other. The market facilitates the deferment of business partner selection and contract signing to the point when the need for the service arises. A set of pre-prepared Internal Enactment Specifications (IESs) provides the mapping of the contract to an organisational blueprint, specified in terms of the internal language, resources and infrastructure of each organisation. The blueprint provides a way of automating the configuration of the Contract Enactment Infrastructure (CEI) for the respective organisations. This complements the deferred selection of a business partner. Advanced CEI technology allows business processes to cross organisational boundaries while providing the consumer with a considerable degree of monitoring and control capability over the contracted service.The integration of our proposed framework and approach supports the creation and management of highly dynamic service markets with automated, fine-grained interaction between organisations, thereby fulfilling the flexibility and efficiency requirements of modern e-business. The approach was used to implement a number of example scenarios and the conclusions drawn from this experience are presented.
In business-to-business relations, contracts serve both as a protection mechanism of trading partners, as well as a prescription document for activities to be executed by the parties. The processes of contract establishment and its enactment are often expensive and time consuming. E-contracting aims at automation of these processes, making them faster and cheaper. For the design of an information system for support of e-contracting, a clear vision of the e-contracting processes is required. In this paper, we introduce a process model for flexible business-to-business e-contracting. To separate concerns, we distinguish structured function and communication perspectives of econtracting processes complemented with consistency rules. The proposed approach allows achieving completeness and consistency in building complex contracting processes.
A contract is an agreement between two or more parties to create business relations or legal obligations between them. A contract
will define the set of activities to be performed by parties satisfying a set of terms and conditions (clauses). An e-contract
is a contract modeled, specified executed, controlled and monitored by a software system. Typically, a workflow management
system is used for e-contract management. E-contracts are complex inter related workflows that have to be specified carefully
to satisfy the contract requirements. Most workflow models do not have the capabilities to handle the complexities of these
interrelationships. That is, an e-contract does not adhere to activity/task oriented workflow process, thus generating a gap
between a conceptual model of e-contract and workflow. Therefore, there is a need for a modeling framework to conceptualize
e-contracts and model the complexity of interrelationships. In this paper, we present a framework for conceptually modeling
e-contracts (using ER-R data model) and a methodology to translate an e-contract to a workflow that can be executed by a workflow
management system.
Contracts are fundamental to the engagement of companies in commercial relations. B2B electronic contracting aims to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the contracting process and to provide new opportunities for the contracting parties. Virtual enterprises, for example, can be dynamically formed on the basis of e-contracts. For the implementation of e-contracting in practice, an integral understanding of the contracting field must be established. In this paper, we propose a conceptual framework for business- to-business e-contracting support. The framework provides a complete view of the e-contracting concepts and is the basis for specifying the requirements of the contracting systems. We use it to position research efforts in the e-contracting domain and to analyse them. Based on the framework, we discuss future research issues regarding e-contracting.
We address the problem of transforming natural language descriptions of contracts into a form that is suitable for automating various contract management functions. We investigate two complementary methods that can be used to achieve this. One method is suitable for the contract specification phase - to specify expected behaviour of contracting parties so that they can satisfy policies stated in a contract. This method also allows for checking aspects of contract consistency as well as flexible integration of internal organisational policies with the contract policies. Another method targets the contact run-time phase - for monitoring behaviour of parties to the contract and other aspects of contract performance. When combined, these two methods provide a basis to support an increasing level of automation of many mundane contract activities, while allowing humans to be involved in ultimate decision making.
As in traditional commerce, parties to a contract in e-business environments are expected to operate in good faith and comply with mutually agreed terms of the contract. It may be the case however that deviation from the agreed contract obligations occur either intentionally or due to force majeure. We argue that there is value in providing various levels of automated support to deal with contract non-compliance in e-marketplaces in order to reach the best overall outcome for all parties. This includes monitoring contract significant events, simple notifications to the parties about non-compliance events and a range of enforcement mechanisms. These mechanisms can be either nondiscretionary (as in preventive security mechanisms) or discretionary, which rely on a number of control mechanisms that are applied when contract rules are violated. We describe a number of such control mechanisms and how they can be used to extend capabilities of a contract management architecture previously developed.
In this report, we present the approach to cross-organizational workflow management of the CrossFlow project. CrossFlow is a European research project aiming at the support of cross-organizational workflows in dynamic virtual enterprises. The cooperation in these virtual enterprises is based on dynamic service outsourcing specified in electronic contracts. Service enactment is performed by dynamically linking the workflow management infrastructures of the involved organizations. Extended service enactment support is provided in the form of cross-organizational transaction management and process control, advanced quality of service monitoring, and support for high-level flexibility in service enactment. CrossFlow technology is realized on top of a commercial workflow management platform and applied in two real-world scenarios in the contexts of a logistics and an insurance company.
In this paper we investigate those aspects of electronic commerce which can be used to facilitate inter-organisational business dealings. The Internet has substantially promoted different aspects of electronic commerce such as electronic ordering and shopping: electronic malls are increasingly becoming part of the modern information society. However, the pace of adoption of emerging computing and communication technologies for electronic business dealings between enterprises is much slower. We argue that, among other reasons, two major factors for this are: i) an inadequate representation of the semantics of business activities and ii) the lack of a sound legal support for electronic interactions. We propose a general framework for business contracts that addresses both of these issues and investigate how this framework can be used in the context of the Internet.
: The paper outlines ongoing research on logic-based tools for the analysis and representation of legal contracts, of the kind frequently encountered in large-scale engineering projects and complex, long-term trading agreements. We consider both contract formation and contract performance, in each case identifying the representational issues and the prospects for providing automated support tools. Keywords: Artificial Intelligence and Law; Contract Drafting; Document Assembly; Knowledge Representation. 1. Introduction Over the last twenty years or so a growing body of research in Artificial Intelligence has focussed on the representation of legislation and regulations (for a comprehensive discussion see (Sergot, 1991)). The motivation for this has been twofold: on the one hand there have been opportunities for developing advisory systems for legal practitioners; on the other hand the Law is a complex domain in which diverse modes of reasoning are employed, offering ample opportunity...
The use of electronic contracts is emerging as a way to improve the efficiency of contracting processes. Electronic contracts are, however, often used as a direct replacement for traditional paper contracts - which we call shallow e-contracting. Consequently, business processes in general and contracting processes in particular do not change much through the use of electronic contracts. New business scenarios caused by e-business developments, however, do require new contracting paradigms in which the use of electronic contracts becomes an essential element to obtain a radical paradigm shift in contractual business relations - which we call deep e-contracting. In this position paper, we explore these new paradigms. We link the paradigms to exchanged values described in e-contracts to obtain a mapping from business requirements. We next map the paradigms to contracting activities. Finally, we map the activities to information technology required for their automated support. Based on the paradigms and mappings, this paper provides a concise framework for the exploration of deep e-contracting.
The paper studies the management of contracts in virtual project supply chains. The problems and challenges occurring as well as the business practices and typical project structures in a networked environment are discussed. The concentration is on large, complex, one-of-a-kind projects and the case companies are from the field of power plants. The paper also introduces means to support the contract management of virtual project organizations by using the strategic information system called Simo-3.
Based on a Business Media Framework (BMF), this paper proposes an architecture for secure electronic contracts, which adhere to legal requirements and can be applied for an integrated management of market transactions. We propose the use of XML, digital signatures, and Java technology for secure electronic contracting. The resulting contract container can be applied for the support of an integrated information flow through the different services of an electronic market. In addition the container holds a control logic, that supports the management of the contract negotiation and the contract settlement. The concept provided in this paper was developed in the Secure Electronic Contracts (SeCo) project of the =mcminstitute of the University of St. Gallen and the University of Zurich, Switzerland, in cooperation with several business partners.
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