Implementing a Rule-Based Contract Compliance Checker

The paper describes the design and implementation of an independent, third party contract monitoring service called Contract Compliance Checker (CCC). The CCC is provided with the specification of the contract in force, and is capable of observing and logging the relevant business-to-business (B2B) interaction events, in order to determine whether the actions of the business partners are consistent with the contract. A contract specification language called EROP (for Events, Rights, Obligations and Prohibitions) for the CCC has been developed based on business rules, that provides constructs to specify what rights, obligation and prohibitions become active and inactive after the occurrence of events related to the execution of business operations. The system has been designed to work with B2B industry standards such as ebXML and RosettaNet.

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