An automatic tool for checking multi-party contracts

Abstract

Contracts play an important role in business where relationships among different parties are dictated by legal rules. The notion of electronic contracts has emerged mostly due to technological advances and the electronic trading among companies and customers. Thereby new challenges have arisen to guarantee reliability among the stakeholders in electronic negotiations. In this scenery, the automatic verification of electronic contracts appeared as the solution but as a new challenge at the same time. An important task on verifying contracts is concerned of detecting conflicts in multi-party contracts. The problem of checking contracts has been largely addressed in the literature, but we are not aware about any method and tool that deals with multi-party contracts and conflict detection using a contract language. This work presents an automatic checker, so-called RECALL, for finding conflicts on multi-party contracts modeled by an extension of a contract language. We developed an automatic checking tool and also applied it to a a well-known case study of selling products that is characterized by multi-party aspects of the contracts. We also performed some experiments in order to show the tool performance w.r.t. the size of contracts.