Modeling and Valuation of Contractual RAM Requirements Using Domain-Specific Languages

Tender documents for supply or servicing of large and complex technical systems often stipulate contractual RAM requirements that may entail substantial costs for the contractor in case of non-conformance. Assessment of the potential financial impact due to these non-conformance costs before submission of a bid, as well as during contract commitment, is essential and should ideally be done in an efficient and transparent manner. Today, this is frequently not the case because the technical, contractual and commercial details of RAM requirements are commonly dealt with by different parties, who are specialists only for their domains and each of them use their own (occasionally simplifying or error-prone) techniques and approaches. In this paper, we present a novel approach that models contractual RAM requirements integrated with technical RAM aspects of a system, both specified in high-level domain languages. Our approach allows stakeholders such as bid managers and technical project managers to perform comprehensive analyses of the financial implications of different technical or contractual alternatives, and to gain a better understanding of different constraints and causes for costs, thus providing improved support for decisions. It is efficient and flexible due to the use of language engineering technologies as well as contract formalization approaches from the financial domain. Based on the high-level domain-specific languages (DSLs), appropriate computational models are automatically generated and the resulting financial risk evaluated and visualized. We illustrate our approach with a (hypothetical) example of a technical project. Last but not least we discuss variation points and generalization possibilities.