Applying electronic contracting to the aerospace aftercare domain

The contract project was a European Commission project whose aim was to develop frameworks, components and tools to model, build, verify and monitor distributed electronic business systems based on electronic contracts. In this context, an electronic contract provides a specification of the expected behaviours of individual services, with the assumption that these services are often enacted by autonomous agents. Using the theoretical tools created by the project, in this paper we describe the complete life cycle of instantiating an electronic contracting system using the contract framework within the aerospace aftercare domain. Thus, we use a natural language description of parts of the types of contracts used in this domain to generate individual norms amenable to a computational representation, and how these norms are used to generate a concrete contract monitor. Moreover, we describe a concrete implementation of contract agents in the AgentSpeak(L) language and how these agents interact within a concrete instantiation of contract.