A High – Level Model – Checking Tool for Verifying Electronic Contracts

An electronic contracting system intended for monitoring and/or enforcement of business-to-business interactions to ensure that they comply with the rights, obligations and prohibitions stipulated in contract clauses requires a machine interpretable specification of the relevant parts of the legal contract in force. Within this context, Event Condition Action (ECA) rules are widely used for representing contracts. Naturally, it is important to verify the correctness properties of such a contract before its deployment. To this end, the paper adopts the use of modelchecking techniques. A high-level model--checking tool has been developed that enables a designer to encode a contract for model checking directly as ECA rules in terms of contract entities: business operations, role players with their rights, obligations and prohibitions. This not only simplifies the task of model building but also, the designer can specify the correctness requirements, in linear temporal logic, directly in terms of the contract entities. The tool has been implemented by extending the PROMELA language of the SPIN model checker. © 2011 Newcastle University. Printed and published by Newcastle University, Computing Science, Claremont Tower, Claremont Road, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 7RU, England. Bibliographical details AABDELSADIQ,A., MOLINA–JIMENEZ, C., SHRIVASTAVA, S. A High–Level Model–Checking Tool for Verifying Electronic Contracts [By] A. Abdelsadiq, C. Molina–Jimenez, S. Shrivastava Newcastle upon Tyne: Newcastle University: Computing Science, 2011. (Newcastle University, Computing Science, Technical Report Series, No. CS-TR-1279)