Explaining the Non-compliance between Templates and Agreement Offers in WS-Agreement

A common approach to the process of reaching agreements is the publication of templates that guide parties to create agreement o ers that are then sent for approval to the template publisher. In such scenario, a common issue the template publisher must address is to check whether the agreement o er received is compliant or not with the template. Furthermore, in the latter case, an automated explanation of the reasons of such non-compliance is very appealing. Unfortunately, although there are proposals that deal with checking the compliance, the problem of providing an automated explanation to the non-compliance has not yet been studied in this context. In this paper, we take a subset of the WS-Agreement recommendation as a starting point and we provide a rigorous de nition of the explanation for the non-compliance between templates and agreement o ers. Furthermore, we propose the use of constraint satisfaction problem (CSP) solvers to implement it and provide a proof-of-concept implementation. The advantage of using CSPs is that it allows expressive service level objectives inside SLAs.