A multi-party contract model

Contracts between multiple business parties play an increasingly important role in the global economy where activities along the value chain are executed by independent, yet co-operating, companies. Information technology to enact a value chain is now being deployed in the form of ERP systems, workflow systems, web services and e-marketplaces. However, there is little known on how to formally model a multi-party contract. In this paper, we investigate how to model a multi-party contract in a manner convenient for detecting the parties responsible for contract violations.

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