Automated eContract Negotiation in Web Service Environment: Electronic Contract Management Aspects

The paper addresses the electronic contract management problems in automated eContract negotiation among software agents in the web service environment. From the point of electronic contract management, the aim of negotiation process is to automatically form contractual agreements between different parties, coordinating their behavior and facilitating contract execution. The contracts specify the commitments that the involved parties make to each other and that play the important role in their interactions. Therefore in the contract representation language the commitments must be explicitly represented and specify what should be done, if the legal norms defined by policies are violated, and inform the parties about the behavior they could expect from the others. The paper familiarizes with the details of electronic contract representation problem and with approaches which has been proposed to solve this problem. It presents also a critical analysis of the proposed approaches and summarizes their challenges and drawbacks. The paper analyses also one of more advanced conceptual framework of negotiation process from the electronic contract representation perspective, highlights its drawbacks and proposes how to improve this framework.