Mechanical Consistency Analysis for Business Contracts and Policies

The EDEE system provides a framework through which businesses may store the data pertaining to business events, contracts and organizational policies, within a single repository using the unifying notion of an occurrence. A collection of stored queries (cf. SQL views) is maintained. Each query describes the desirable, undesirable, and not-undesirable occurrences under the provisions (obligations, prohibitions, and privileges or immunities) of the contracts and policies of an organization. Desirable occurrences are those that are obliged according to some obligation. Undesirable occurrences are those that lead to violation, as per some explicit or implicit prohibition. Not-undesirable occurrences are those that explicitly do not lead to violations, as specified by some privilege or immunity. This paper proposes a mechanism for the dynamic derivation of the overlaps between provisions. We show, through a worked example, that by determining the covering relationships between stored queries we can mechanically discover inconsistencies in business contracts and organizational policies between obligations and privileges, and between different descriptions of obligations.