Towards a Formalisation of Electronic Contracting Environments

Clauses within contracts may be thought of as norms, specifying permissions, obligations and prohibitions on contract parties. In this paper, we present a formal representation of contracts, focusing on the specification of a model of norms. With this model, a norm is associated with a status, which may change as the environment, and the status of other norms, changes. We define a normative environment, which may be used to track the status of a set of norms throughout their lifecycle, and then describe a predicates that may be used to evaluate a norm's status. Agents are able to use these predicates to reason about the status of norms, and how their actions will affect the normative environment. Finally, we show the applicability of our framework to real world domains by monitoring the execution of a contract taken from a real world scenario.