The goal of the Elemental project is to propose options for describing enterprise models of business contracts and use them as a basis for implementing support for enterprise-wide, real-time and distributed contract management systems. These models are considered in relation to an overall enterprise model for extended enterprise - involving both the intra-organisational and inter-organisational relationships and collaborations. The aim is to provide an increasing level of automation of contract management activities in the enterprise - while keeping people in the loop for executing certain actions and ultimate decision making. These activities span all stages in a contract-life cycle including drafting, negotiation, storing/archiving, monitoring, enforcement and various contract analytics features. This work leverages our earlier enterprise modelling research that focused on the intra-enterprise models - for business processes, roles, business events and business policies - the main outcome of which being the OMG standard UML profile for Enterprise Distributed Object Computing (EDOC).

Research problems range from the description of semantics of contracts suitable for real-time e-business environment, such as event-driven and policy-based contract monitoring - via the development of a core enterprise architecture flexibly tailorable to specific contract scenarios and vertical domains - to the development of research prototype that can be used as a proof of concept and a basis for commercial offerings. The project makes use of wide range of XML, Web Service, and e-commerce standards and also influences developments of some e-business standards such as OASIS standardisation of e-contracts.

Contact Point:
Dr Zoran Milosevic
Phone 07 3365 4310
Email zoran@dstc.edu.au

Staff:
Zoran Milosevic DSTC