Related papers: Computable Contracts in the Financial Services Ind…

There is a growing interest in running legal contracts on digital systems, at the same time, it is important to understand to what extent software contracts may capture legal content. We then undertake a foundational study of legal…

A smart contract is a translation of a standard paper-based contract that can be enforced and executed by a contract management system. At a high level of abstraction, a contract is only a document that describes how the signing parties are…

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 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 this paper we discuss how conventional business contracts can be converted into smart contracts---their electronic equivalents that can be used to systematically monitor and enforce contractual rights, obligations and prohibitions at run…

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…

There is a strong consensus that combining the versatility of machine learning with the assurances given by formal verification is highly desirable. It is much less clear what verified machine learning should mean exactly. We consider this…

Cloud computing (cloud computing) is a kind of distributed computing, referring to the network "cloud" will be a huge data calculation and processing program into countless small programs, and then, through the system composed of multiple…

Smart Contract Templates support legally-enforceable smart contracts, using operational parameters to connect legal agreements to standardised code. In this paper, we explore the design landscape of potential formats for storage and…

We analyse so-called computable laws, i.e., laws that can be enforced by automatic procedures. These laws should be logically perfect and unambiguous, but sometimes they are not. We use a regulation on road transport to illustrate this…

This paper introduces abstractions that are meaningful for computers and that can be built and used according to computers' own criteria, i.e., computable abstractions. It is analyzed how abstractions can be seen to serve as the building…

Contracts are a form of lightweight formal specification embedded in the program text. Being executable parts of the code, they encourage programmers to devote proper attention to specifications, and help maintain consistency between…

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…

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…

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…

Programmable money, enabled by digital currencies, facilitates outcomes beyond simple payments by allowing users to attach conditions to the movement of funds through code. However, there is a lack of clarity on defining programmable money,…

Large electricity customers (e.g., large data centers) can exhibit huge and variable electricity demands, which poses significant challenges for the electricity suppliers to plan for sufficient capacity. Thus, it is desirable to design…

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…

Smart Contracts are commonly considered to be an important component or even a key to many business solutions in an immense variety of sectors and promises to securely increase their individual efficiency in an ever more digitized…

This paper discusses preliminary investigations on the monitorability of contracts for web service descriptions. There are settings where servers do not guarantee statically whether they satisfy some specified contract, which forces the…