Figure A.01 - Agreement Business Entity and Its Inherited Associations

One form of business interaction in which Parties (for example, Service Providers or Customers) engage is an agreement.  An agreement is a contract or arrangement, either written or verbal and sometimes enforceable by law, such as a service level agreement or a customer price agreement.  An agreement involves a number of other business entities, such as Products, Services, and/or Resources.  This can also extend to Product, Resource, and/or Service specifications. In the SID model an agreement is a subclass (type) of BusinessInteraction. A resulting benefit is that an agreement inherits a number of informational characteristics from business interaction in the model.<br/>The inherited business characteristics of an Agreement (class) include:<br/><ul>
<li>Associations with Products, Service, and/or Resources (as well as with their specifications) involved in agreement items (not shown in the figure below)</li><li>Association with business participants (Parties, Roles and Resources) that engage in Agreements</li><li>Associations with locations (Locations)</li><li>Associations with other BusinessInteractions, such as Requests, Responses, and Notifications.</li></ul>
Details about BusinessInteractions can be found in Business Interaction paragraph.  This addendum, focuses on the informational characteristics that are unique to an Agreement.<br/>An Agreement possesses a number of attributes and relationships that are unique to it.  The figure below shows the attributes unique to an Agreement.  The remainder of this overview provides a glimpse of the relationships and other business entities that make up the aggregate business entity Agreement.<br/>