Automated Generation of Electronic Procedures: Procedure Constraint Grammars

Electronic trade procedures or ‘scenarios’ are ready made, generic and reusable transaction models for trade communities such as seaports, banking, logistics, etc. They are made available to parties for downloading from repositories provided by international, regional, or industry organizations. However, current workflow-like representations of trade scenarios do not provide for situation-specific customization of the transaction model. Instead of designing specific trade procedures for each possible variation of a transaction, we develop a generative grammar formalism that defines entire families of related trade procedures. Since trade procedures are influenced by various situation-specific factors from multiple sources, we have been led to modify the usual grammar formalism to take into account a variety of constraints. The formalism is, therefore, called a procedure constraint grammar (PCG). The resulting functionality allows for a far greater level of flexibility for customized electronic trade procedures than current approaches provide. Numerous examples are provided. D 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.