Monitoring Directed Obligations with Flexible Deadlines: A Rule-Based Approach

Real-world business relationships have an essentially cooperative nature. However, when modeling contractual norms using normative multi-agent systems, it is typical to give norms a strict and domain independent semantics. We argue that in B2B contract enactment cooperation should be taken into account when modeling contractual commitments through obligations. We introduce an approach to model such commitments based on directed obligations with time windows. Our proposal is based on authorizations granted at specific states of an obligation lifecycle model, made possible by handling deadlines in a flexible way. We formalize such obligations using linear temporal logic and provide an implementation to their semantics using a set of monitoring rules employed in a forward-chaining inference engine. We show, through experimentation, the correctness of the obtained monitoring tool in different contract enactment situations.