Detection of conflicts in electronic contracts

Abstract

Today’s trend towards service-oriented architectures, in which different decoupled services distributed not only on different machines within a single organisation but also outside of it, provides new challenges for reliability and

trust. Since an organisation may need to execute code provided by third parties, it requires mechanisms to protect

itself. One of such mechanisms is the use of contracts.

Since services are frequently composed of different subservices, each with its own contract, there is a need to

guarantee that each single contract is conflict-free. Moreover, one needs to ensure that the conjunction of all the

contracts is also conflict-free —meaning that the contracts will never lead to conflicting or contradictory normative directives.