Multiparty Contracts: Agreeing and Implementing Interorganizational Processes

A contract specifies an interorganizational process together with a distribution of responsibilities for the activities among the parties involved. In this paper, we formally show how a party can implement its part of the contract such that the implementation accords with the contract. We propose a formal notion of a contract and give a criterion for accordance between a local implementation and a contract such that, if all local implementations accord with the contract, the overall process is deadlock-free and it is always possible to terminate properly. Then, we sketch a technique for automatically checking the proposed accordance criterion. Finally, we present accordance-preserving transformation rules. These rules can be used to implement a part of the contract while preserving the accordance criterion.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: CJ
• Authors: Wil M. P. van der Aalst, Niels Lohmann, Peter Massuthe, Christian Stahl, Karsten Wolf
• Keywords: CJ 2010, Formal Notion, Interorganizational Process, Local Implementations