Establishing Business Rules for Inter-Enterprise Electronic Commerce

Conventional mechanisms for electronic commerce provide strong means for securing transfer of funds, and for ensuring such things as authenticity and non-repudiation. But they generally do not attempt to regulate the activities of the participants in an e-commerce transaction, treating them, implicitly, as autonomous agents. This is adequate for most cases of client-to-vendor commerce, but is quite unsatisfactory for inter-enterprise electronic commerce. The participants in this kind of e-commerce are not autonomous agents, since their commercial activities are subject to the business rules of their respective enterprises, and to the preexisting agreements and contracts between the enterprises involved. These policies are likely to be independently developed, and may be quite heterogeneous. Yet, they have to interoperate, and be brought to bear in regulating each e-commerce transaction. This paper presents a mechanism that allows such interoperation between policies, and thus provides for inter-enterprise electronic commerce.