A Multi-level Model for Activity Commitments in E-contracts

An e-contract is a contract modeled, specified, executed, controlled and monitored by a software system. A contract is a legal agreement involving parties, activities, clauses and payments. The goals of an e-contract include precise specification of the activities of the contract, mapping them into deployable workflows, and providing transactional support in their execution. Activities in a contract are complex and interdependent. They may be executed by different parties autonomously and in a loosely coupled fashion. They may be compensated and/or re-executed at different times relative to the execution of other activities. Both the initial specification of the activities and the later verification of their executions with respect to compliance to the clauses are tedious and complicated. We believe that an e-contract should reflect both the specification and the execution aspects of the activities at the same time, where the former is about the composition logic and the later about the transactional properties. Towards facilitating this, we propose a multi-level composition model for activities in e-contracts. Our model allows for the specification of a number of transactional properties, like atomicity and commitment, for activities at all levels of the composition. In addition to their novelty, the transactional properties help to coordinate payments and eventual closure of the contract.