Related papers: Transforming Commercial Contracts through Computab…
The notion of contract aware components has been published roughly ten years ago and is now becoming mainstream in several fields where the usage of software components is seen as critical. The goal of this paper is to survey domains such…
Unilateral contracts, such as terms of service, play a substantial role in modern digital life. However, few users read these documents before accepting the terms within, as they are too long and the language too complicated. We propose the…
We present a parametric calculus for contract-based computing in distributed systems. By abstracting from the actual contract language, our calculus generalises both the contracts-as-processes and contracts-as-formulae paradigms. The…
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…
We characterize digital cash as the digital equivalent of physical cash: secure, fungible, decentralized, directly controlled, privacy-preserving; but enhanced with qualitatively new functionality. It is extremely efficiently transferable…
We examine blockchain technologies, especially smart contracts, as a platform for decentralized applications. By providing a basis for consensus, blockchain promises to upend business models that presuppose a central authority. However,…
In an increasingly complex contractual landscape, the demand for transparency, security, and efficiency has intensified. Blockchain technology, with its decentralized and immutable nature, addresses these challenges by reducing intermediary…
Building complex software systems necessitates the use of component-based architectures. In theory, of the set of components needed for a design, only some small portion of them are "custom"; the rest are reused or refactored existing…
The ability to negotiate contracts for a wide range of aspects and to provide services conforming to them is a most pressing need in service-oriented architectures. High-level models of contracts are making their way into the area, but…
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…
With technological advances and the establishment of e-commerce models, business challenges have shifted to online platforms. The promise of embedding self-executing and autonomous programs into blockchain technologies has attracted…
Contract theory studies how a principal can incentivize agents to exert costly, unobservable effort through performance-based payments. While classical economic models provide elegant characterizations of optimal solutions, modern…
While the blockchain-based smart contract has become a hot topic of research over the last decade, not the least in the context of Industry 4.0, it now has well-known legal and technical shortcomings that currently prohibit its real-world…
The blockchain constitutes a technology-based, rather than social or regulation based, means to lower uncertainty about one another in order to exchange value. However, its use may very well also lead to increased complexity resulting from…
Smart contracts are computer programs that can be consistently executed by a network of mutually distrusting nodes, without the arbitration of a trusted authority. Because of their resilience to tampering, smart contracts are appealing in…
Formal verification entails testing software to ensure it operates as specified. Smart contracts are self-executing contracts with the terms of the agreement directly written into lines of code. They run on blockchain platforms and…
Existing techniques of Design by Contract do not allow software developers to specify complete contracts in many cases. Incomplete contracts leave room for malicious implementations. This article complements Design by Contract with a simple…
Design by Contract enables seamless software development by unifying software requirements with their implementations. In its pure form, however, Design by Contract leaves some problems with contracts' expressiveness, verifiability, and…
The digitization of the world has also led to a digitization of communication processes. Traditional research methods fall short in understanding communication in digital worlds as the scope has become too large in volume, variety, and…
The world is witnessing the birth of a revolutionary computing paradigm that promises to have a profound effect on the way we interact with computers, devices, physical spaces, and other people. This new technology, called ubiquitous…