Monitoring Multi-party Contracts for E-business

Contracts between multiple business parties play an
important role in a global economy where activities
along the value chain are executed by independent,
co-operating organizations. Information technology to
enact a value chain is now being deployed in the form
of ERP systems and service oriented architectures.
However, little is known about how to verify whether
such an enactment indeed fulfills the contract
between the parties. This book investigates how to
formalize a contract which could support not only the
detection of actual violations, but also the
pro-active detection of imminent contract violations.
Under our monitoring mechanism, a multi-party
contract can be dynamically monitored during the
contract execution, and all responsible parties for a
contract violation under execution of a multi-party
contract can be detected. The work should shed some
light on monitoring multi-party contracts in
e-business environment, and should be especially
useful to researchers in business process
integration, business process outsource
monitoring, monitoring web service execution fields,
or anyone who may be considering issues of
monitorability and reliability of e-markets.

Autorentext
Dr. Lai Xu is a Senior Researcher at SAP research, Switzerland. She received her Ph.D. in Computerized Information Systems from Tilburg University, the Netherlands in 2004. Her main research areas are in business process integration, multi-party process monitoring, Web Services composition and service-oriented applications.

Klappentext
Contracts between multiple business parties play an important role in a global economy where activities along the value chain are executed by independent, co-operating organizations. Information technology to enact a value chain is now being deployed in the form of ERP systems and service oriented architectures. However, little is known about how to verify whether such an enactment indeed fulfills the contract between the parties. This book investigates how to formalize a contract which could support not only the detection of actual violations, but also the pro-active detection of imminent contract violations. Under our monitoring mechanism, a multi-party contract can be dynamically monitored during the contract execution, and all responsible parties for a contract violation under execution of a multi-party contract can be detected. The work should shed some light on monitoring multi-party contracts in e-business environment, and should be especially useful to researchers in business process integration, business process outsource monitoring, monitoring web service execution fields, or anyone who may be considering issues of monitorability and reliability of e-markets.