Evidence-Based Electronic Contract Performance Monitoring

One aspect of the development of e-market services for the facilitation of business-to-business electronic commerce concerns the provision of automated support for contract performance assessment. Assessing the parties' performance of an agreement, once it comes into force, requires reasoning with the contract terms (obligations, rights, powers and other legal relations that obtain between parties) as parties go about conducting their business exchange, sometimes complying and sometimes deviating from their pre-agreed prescribed behaviour. Compliance with prescribed behaviour is typically evaluated individually by each partner to an agreement and where parties' views differ, disputes arise that require some form of resolution. In this paper we present a simple architecture for an e-market, where an artificial (controller) agent undertakes such resolution. The controller's decision-making is informed by the agreement and each party's view of whether its own and the counter-party's behaviour comply with it. Thus, the controller forms an opinion on the basis of such evidence (and possible additional recommendations from agents representing the parties), in similar spirit to a (human) judge's process of reasoning in arriving at his ruling. We consider this as a belief formation problem and explore the potential of using subjective reasoning to represent an individual's (possibly partial) views and to reason about their joint conflict and consensus formation. We comment on the relation of such belief formation on the establishment of trust between partners to an agreement and between the latter and the controller of an e-market.