Analyzing Contract Robustness through a Model of Commitments

Abstract

Abstract. We address one of the challenges in developing solutions based on multiagent systems for the problems of cross-organizational business processes and commerce generally. Specifically, we study how to gather and analyze requirements embodied within business contracts using the abstractions from multiagent systems. Commerce is driven by business contracts. Each party to a business contract must be assured that the contract is robust, in the sense that it fulfills its goals and avoids undesirable outcomes. However, real-life business contracts tend to be complex and unamenable both to manual scrutiny and domain-independent scientific methods, making it difficult to provide automated support for determining or improving their robustness. As a result, establishing a contract is nontrivial and adds significantly to the transaction costs of conducting business. If the adoption of multiagent systems approaches in supporting business interactions is to be viable, we need to develop appropriate techniques to enable tools to reason about contracts in relation to their robustness. To this end, we propose a powerful approach to assessing the robustness of contracts, and make two main contributions. First, we demonstrate a novel conceptual model for contracts that is based on commitments. Second, we offer a methodology for (i) creating commitment-based models of contracts from textual descriptions, and (ii) evaluating the contract models for robustness. We validate these contributions via a study of real-world contracts.

Toward a Perdurantist Ontology of Contracts

“…It represents an example of how a perdurantist ontology is capable of modelling socially constructed objects. Due to limitations of space we have omitted a thorough comparison with similar work aimed at modelling contracts and services (for example, see [17], [20], [21], [22], [23]). Suffice to note here that the main difference lies in the modelling of commitments and their fulfilment events as temporal parts of the parties involved in the contract.…”

Automated Analysis of Commitment Protocols Using Probabilistic Model Checking

“…Before discussing about the necessity of these properties, we point out to some related work in which similar proper-ties to the ones we identify are studied. Singh and Chopra discuss conformance between two roles and also between an agent and a role (Singh and Chopra 2010) and Chopra et al (Chopra et al 2011) study robustness of commitment protocols, which basically corresponds to our achievement property. However, these studies discuss these properties as abstract concepts without a concrete formalization.…”

Research on the Participant Behavior Selections of the Energy Performance Contracting Project Based on the Robustness of the Shared Savings Contract

“…We also calculate the scope of the contract period to be 6 ď t x ď 15 by condition (4), and the floor of the contract period decreases from 7 to 6. The ceiling and the floor of the revenue share during the contract period are x asmmax and x asmmin respectively, according to Equation (7). The results are as shown on Figure 3.…”

“…We choose shared savings contracts to study in this paper. Based on the concept of the robustness of a commercial service contract provided by Chopra et al [7], Qian and Guo [1] proposed the concept of the robustness of shared savings contract, which is exemplified by the situation in which, after the revenue sharing ratio and the contract period agreement are decided, the contract is smoothly implemented, even in the face of uncertainties in the contract period [1]. So it is needed to industriously improve the robustness of shared savings contract without changing revenue sharing rules to increase the possibility of the smooth implementation of the EPCP.…”