CONTRACT was a research project funded by the European Commission in the context of the 6th Framework Program. The aim of the project was to develop frameworks, components and tools which make it possible to model, build, verify and monitor distributed electronic business systems on the basis of dynamically generated, cross-organisational contracts. These electronic contracts underpin formal descriptions of the expected behaviours of individual services and the system as a whole.

The project covered both theoretical and practical aspects and the resulting systems make it possible to:

• Specify electronic business-to-business interactions in terms of contracts.
• Dynamically establish and manage contracts at runtime in a digital business environment.
• Apply formal verification techniques to collections of contracts in a digital business environment.
  
• Apply monitoring techniques to contract implementation in order to help provide the basis for business confidence in e-Business infrastructures.

Project results include publicly available theoretical models, a reusable contracting language specification, open source contract based application environments and tools implementing innovative analysis, verification and monitoring techniques which make it possible to check the properties of contract based business systems both at design time and runtime.