Supporting contract match-making

This paper describes a preliminary investigation of contracts with a view towards automating the process of contract match-making. A novel approach based on exploiting standard form contracts is described. The approach is shown to be implementable with current technology and a discussion of the CORBA/ODP trading service extensions necessary for implementing the proposed contract match-making is provided. A second approach based on standard contract clauses which overcomes some of the limitations of standard form contracts, is briefly outlined. The flexibility offered by this approach however, is accompanied by a considerable increase in the complexity of contract match-making. Both standard form contracts and standard contract clauses based match-making point towards an exciting area of future research.