Notice of Violation of IEEE Publication Principles: Monitorable electronic contract

Notice of Violation of IEEE Publication Principles

"Monitorable Electronic Contract"
by Lai Xu
in the Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on E-Commerce (CEC'03), June 2003

After careful and considered review of the content and authorship of this paper by a duly constituted expert committee, this paper has been found to be in violation of IEEE's Publication Principles.

This paper duplicates original work from the papers cited below. The original work was reproduced without attribution (including appropriate references to the original author(s) and/or paper title) and without permission.

"A Customizable Coordination Service for Autonomous Agents"
by Munindar P. Singh
in the Proceedings of the International Workshop on Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages (ATAL), July 1997

"Formal Aspects of Workflow Management: Part 2: Distributed Scheduling"
by Munindar P. Singh
appearing on http://www.csc.ncsu.edu/faculty/mpsingh/papers/databases/wf_scheduling.pdf 1997


An agent-based e-commerce (electronic commerce) environment is regarded as one of the most suitable open environments for electronic marketplaces. Because of agent's autonomous, reactive and proactive features, agents can, on the one hand, act on behalf of their owner, and use individual strategies to increase the ability to do business; on the other hand, the problem of how to force agents to comply with prescribed behavior and to have effective monitoring is more complicated. Be able to monitor the contract at the fulfillment stage is the key for a reliable, flexible and efficient, realistic and acceptable e-market which should maintain the benefits among all contractual parties. At the contract fulfillment stage, all commitments and prescribed actions, clearly described at paper contracts between businesses, can be expressed as an electronic contract, which can be generated and executed automatically. This paper first proposes a monitorable contract model, which can be automatically monitored in business execution. Next, we demonstrate architecture, which could dynamically monitor business processes using our monitorable e-contract model. Our approach not only supports the detection of actual violations but also pro-active detection imminent contract violations. A multi-party case is used to explain our approach.