SweetDeal: Representing Agent Contracts With Exceptions using XML Rules, Ontologies, and Process Descriptions

Abstract

Abstract:SweetDeal is a rule-based approach to representation of business contracts that enables software agents to create, evaluate, negotiate, and execute contracts with substantial automation and modularity. It builds upon the situated courteous logic programs knowledge representation in RuleML, the emerging standard for Semantic Web XML rules.Here, we newly extend the SweetDeal approach by also incorporating process knowledge descriptions whose ontologies are represented in DAML+OIL (the close predecessor of W3C's OWL, the emerging standard for Semantic Web ontologies), thereby enabling more complex contracts with behavioral provisions, especially for handling exception conditions (e.g., late delivery or non-payment) that might arise during the execution of the contract. This provides a foundation for representing and automating deals about services -in particular, about Web Services, so as to help search, select, and compose them.We give a detailed application scenario of late delivery in manufacturing supply chain management (SCM). In doing so, we draw upon our new formalization of process ontology knowledge from the MIT Process Handbook, a large, previously-existing repository used by practical industrial process designers. Our system is the first to combine emerging Semantic Web standards for knowledge representation of rules (RuleML) with ontologies (DAML+OIL/OWL) with each other, and moreover for a practical e-business application domain, and further to do so with process knowledge. This also newly fleshes out the evolving concept of Semantic Web Services. A prototype (soon public) is running.--3

Correctness Properties for Multiagent Systems

“…Our work can provide the rigorous underpinnings for work such as the MITPH. Grosof and Poon [41] develop a system to represent and execute business rules from MITPH. Wyner and Lee [42] study specialization for data flow diagrams.…”

DR-CONTRACT: an architecture for e-contracts in defeasible logic

“…Hence the attribute rule is a reference to the rule that has been violated. Many contract languages, for example, the languages proposed by Grosof and Poon (2003) and Milosevic et al (2004), contain similar constructions. The activation of such constructions/processes requires the generation of a violation event/literal.…”

Tools and Infrastructure Facilities for Controlling Non-Functional Properties in Inter-Enterprise in Collaborations

“…In the analysis of monitoring rule language requirements (e.g., RuleML [13]), policy languages (e.g., Ponder [14]), service level agreement languages (e.g., WSLA, WS-Policy; survey [15]), or eContract languages(e.g., BCA [16], [17]), we have seen that the expressive power of the already existing languages is sufficient. Support is found for major groups of a) obligation, prohibition, permission, b) time, duration, (partial) ordering of events, c) identity of business services, d) role and interaction names, policy names and value domains (these are scoped by the business network models), e) assignment rules to guide assigning business services to roles (fulfilment rules to monitor whether the assigned service keeps fulfilling the role requirements and the fulfilment rule criteria; both of these can address collaborative, contractual or extra-functional aspects as well as identities or properties of services as declared in their service types or properties of interactions), f) reputation of business services (not hosts, enterprises or software alone), g) service level and dependability, defined separately for each service type, h) binding service level, and i) expressions on collecting business value and business asset related information.…”