Supporting Contract Execution through Recommended Workflows

This paper extends our previous research on e-contracts by investigating the problem of deriving business process specifications from business contracts. The aim here is to reduce the risk of behaviour leading to contract violations by encouraging the parties to a contract to follow execution paths that satisfy the policies in the contract. Our current contract monitoring prototype provides run-time checking of policies in contracts. If this system was linked to workflow systems that automate the associated business processes in the contract parties, a finer grain of control and early warning could be provided. We use an example contract to illustrate the different views and the problems of deriving business processes from contracts. We propose a set of heuristics that can be used to facilitate this derivation.