The representation of e-contracts as default theories

Abstract

It is widely acknowledged that a temporal representation of e-contracts is essential in order to support e-contract execution and performance monitoring. One possibility that has been explored by many researchers is to represent e-contracts in Event Calculus. Although such representations are intuitive and facilitate temporal reasoning about actions/events and their factual and normative effects, they fall short in situations where domain knowledge cannot be assumed to be complete. Moreover, it is not clear how dynamic normative conflict resolution can be achieved, without resorting to unintuitive representations for conflict resolution strategies. In order to maintain the benefits of an underlying Event Calculus representation, and incorporate assumption-based reasoning and dynamic conflict management capability, we propose a representation of e-contracts as Default Theories, which are constructed by translating Event Calculus representations dynamically. Finally, we discuss how the resulting Default Theory representation enables a software agent to address various reasoning problems. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.