Analyzing Contract Robustness through a Model of Commitments

Commerce is driven by business contracts. Here, each party to such a contract must be assured that it is robust, fulfilling its goals and avoiding undesirable outcomes. However, real-life business contracts tend to be complex and unamenable both to manual scrutiny and domain- independent scientific methods, making it difficult to provide automated support for determining or improving their robustness. As a result, establishing a contract is nontrivial and adds significantly to the transaction costs of conducting business. If the adoption of multi-agent systems approaches in supporting business interactions is to be viable, we need to develop appropriate techniques to allow such software to reason about contracts in relation to their robustness. To this end, in this paper we propose a powerful approach to assessing the robustness of contracts, and make three main contributions. First, we demonstrate a novel commitment-based formal model for contracts. Second, we define rules to evaluate the robustness of contracts. Third, we offer a methodology for modeling contracts to enable checking them for robustness. We validate these contributions via real-world contracts.