Towards Formal Modeling of e-Contracts

The emerging B2B technologies allow for more automated management of e-contracts including contract drafting, negotiation and monitoring. As technology infrastructure becomes available for electronic exchange of contracts and contract-related messages, the IT community is becoming more interested in modeling of contracts as governance structures for many interorganisational interactions. This paper presents our initial ideas for formal modeling of e-contracts. This includes specification of deontic constraints and verification of deontic consistency associated with roles in a contract, precise modeling of temporal constraints/estimates and verification of temporal consistency of an e-contract, and finally scheduling of the required actions. The paper also introduces visualisation concepts such as role windows and time maps and describes how they could be used as decision support tools during contract negotiation.