Related papers: Contracts in distributed systems
We investigate how contracts can be used to regulate the interaction between processes. To do that, we study a variant of the concurrent constraints calculus presented in [1], featuring primitives for multi-party synchronization via…
Contracts are an essential and fundamental component of commerce and society, serving to clarify agreement between multiple parties. While digital technologies have helped to automate many activities associated with contracting, the…
We propose a formal model for distributed systems, where each participant advertises its requirements and obligations as behavioural contracts, and where multiparty sessions are started when a set of contracts allows to synthesise a…
Contracts are a well-established approach for describing and analyzing behavioral aspects of web service compositions. The theory of contracts comes equipped with a notion of compatibility between clients and servers that ensures that every…
Contract theories have been proposed to formally support distributed and decentralized system design while ensuring safe system integration. In this paper we propose hypercontracts, a generic model with a richer structure for its underlying…
We present the mathematical foundations of the contract-based model developed in the framework of the SPEEDS project. SPEEDS aims at developing methods and tools to support "speculative design", a design methodology in which distributed…
Contract-based design is a method to facilitate modular system design. While there has been substantial progress on the theory of contracts, there has been less progress on scalable algorithms for the algebraic operations in this theory. In…
Many of the problems that arise in the context of blockchains and decentralized finance can be seen as variations on classical problems of distributed computing. The smart contract model proposed here is intended to capture both the…
We consider the classic principal-agent model of contract theory, in which a principal designs an outcome-dependent compensation scheme to incentivize an agent to take a costly and unobservable action. When all of the model…
Nowadays, sophisticated domains are emerging which require appropriate formalisms to be specified accurately in order to reason about them. One such domain is constituted of smart contracts that have emerged in cyber physical systems as a…
We introduce a basic model for contracts. Our model extends event structures with a new relation, which faithfully captures the circular dependencies among contract clauses. We establish whether an agreement exists which respects all the…
Using dedicated software to represent or enact legislation or regulation has the advantage of solving the inherent ambiguity of legal texts and enabling the automation of compliance with legal norms. On the other hand, the so-called…
We consider a seller who offers services to a buyer with multi-unit demand. Prior to the realization of demand, the buyer receives a noisy signal of their future demand, and the seller can design contracts based on the reported value of…
We introduce a new model of combinatorial contracts in which a principal delegates the execution of a costly task to an agent. To complete the task, the agent can take any subset of a given set of unobservable actions, each of which has an…
A computable contract is a contract that a computer can read, understand and execute. The financial services industry makes extensive use of contracts, for example, mortgage agreements, derivatives contracts, arbitration agreements, etc.…
This paper concentrates on the representation of the legal relations that obtain between parties once they have entered a contractual agreement and their evolution as the agreement progresses through time. Contracts are regarded as process…
In the combinatorial action model of contract design, a principal delegates a complex project to an agent, incentivizing a subset of actions from a ground set of $n$ actions, via a linear contract. Computing the optimal contract is a…
The use of behavioural contracts, to specify, regulate and verify systems, is particularly relevant to runtime monitoring of distributed systems. System distribution poses major challenges to contract monitoring, from monitoring-induced…
Cyber-physical systems (CPS) are assemblies of networked, heterogeneous, hardware, and software components sensing, evaluating, and actuating a physical environment. This heterogeneity induces complexity that makes CPSs challenging to model…
This paper introduces assume/guarantee contracts on continuous-time control systems, hereby extending contract theories for discrete systems to certain new model classes and specifications. Contracts are regarded as formal characterizations…