Contracts for Controlling Business Processes in Dynamic Environments

We present an approach for declaratively specifying business processes in terms of contracts. An assumption in the paper is that the responsibilities for executing the tasks in a business process are distributed among a set of autonomous actors. The issue we are addressing in this paper is how to bridge the gap between central business process planning and the execution of tasks by providers with specialized domain knowledge with resource and time restrictions in highly dynamic environments. We develop a formalism for writing contracts between the business process owner and the providers for assuring the execution of the business process within time and resource limitations.