Abstract

Contracts between multiple business parties play an important role in a global economy where activities along the value chain are executed by independent, co-operating organizations. Information technology to enact a value chain is now being deployed in the form of ERP systems and service oriented architectures. However, little is known about how to verify whether such an enactment indeed fulfills the contract between the parties. This book investigates how to formalize a contract which could support not only the detection of actual violations, but also the pro-active detection of imminent contract violations. Under our monitoring mechanism, a multi-party contract can be dynamically monitored during the contract execution, and all responsible parties for a contract violation under execution of a multi-party contract can be detected. The work should shed some light on monitoring multi-party contracts in e-business environment, and should be especially useful to researchers in business process integration, business process outsource monitoring, monitoring web service execution fields, or anyone who may be considering issues of monitorability and reliability of e-markets.