A contract layered architecture for regulating cross-organisational business processes

As technology infrastructure becomes available for electronic exchange of contracts, the IT community is becoming more interested in modeling of contracts as governance structures for inter-organisational interactions and business processes. This paper investigates e-contract modeling and monitoring. Subsquently, we propose a contract layered model that allows for the convenient monitoring of multi-party contracts during contract fulfillment and reduces complexity of interrelationships. Communication between contract parties relies on a event-based mechanism which extends the scope and flexibility of our model.