POETS: Process-oriented event-driven transaction systems

We present a high-level enterprise system architecture that closely models the domain ontology of resource and information flows in enterprises. It is: Process-oriented: formal, user-definable specifications for the expected exchange of resources (money, goods, and services), notably contracts, are represented explicitly in the system state to reflect expectations on future events; Event-driven: events denote relevant information about real-world transactions, specifically the transfer of resources and information between economic agents, to which the system reacts by matching against its portfolio of running processes/contracts in real time; Declarative: user defined reporting functions can be formulated as declarative functions on the system state, including the representations of residual contractual obligations. We introduce the architecture and demonstrate how analyses of the standard reporting requirements for companies—the income statement and the balance sheet—can be used to drive the design of events that need registering for such reporting purposes. We then illustrate how the multi-party obligations in trade contracts (sale, purchase), including pricing and VAT payments, can be represented as formal contract expressions that can be subjected to analysis. To the best of our knowledge this is the first architecture for enterprise resource accounting that demonstrably maps high-level process and information requirements directly to executable specifications.