Formalizing and Reasoning About Supply Chain Contracts Between Agents

Inspired by the recent problems in supply chains, we propose an approach to declarative modeling of contracts between agents that will eventually support reasoning about resilience of and about ways to improve supply chains. Specifically, we present a high-level language for specifying and reasoning about contracts over action domains of agents. We assume that the behavior of the agents can be formally expressed through action theories and view a contract as a collection of constraints. Each constraint specifies the responsibility of an agent to achieve a certain result by a deadline. Each agent also has a mapping between constraints and the agent’s concerns, i.e. issues that the agent is concerned about, which are modeled in accordance with the CPS Framework proposed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. We discuss how common questions related to the fulfillment of a contract or the concerns of the agents can be answered and computed via Answer Set Programming.