Architectures for Automated Contractual Cooperation
Emanuel Palm · Epubl LTU · 2021
Every agreement freely entered into is a contract. Some are stated in front of witnesses, other are implied by actions, while yet other are meticulously recorded in lengthy documents. They specify the terms of collaboration and allow for disputes to be settled in a court of law. Given their ubiquity, it stands to reason that the potential benefits from digitalizing contracting are enormous. Computers are faster and more consistent than humans are, and they could be capable of analyzing, negotiating, verifying and performing contracts more effectively than humans ever could. However, for digital contracts to be as useful as the ones they replace, they must also be as general-purpose.In this thesis, we contextualize and present the research that culminated in our Contract Network Architecture, which facilitates automatable and general-purpose collaborations by allowing for Ricardian contracts to be negotiated digitally. Furthermore, we outline (1) a method for pruning transactions from blockchains without loosing the ability to derive certain states, (2) a formalism for translating message payloads between encodings without risk of information loss, (3) Kalix, a Java 11 library for Eclipse Arrowhead system-of-systems development, and (4) the predecessor to the architecture we just mentioned, the Exchange Network Architecture.In comparison to other proposed solutions for digital collaboration, our architectures do not have to rely on a blockchain, or other disruptive kind of distributed ledger technology. In addition, neither of them relies on the smart contract, which sidesteps current contractual praxis by being a computer program rather than a conventional contract. This means that the current contractual paradigm can be preserved if using our solution, which should make it an attractive area of pursuit for industrial actors, and others, wishing to have a general-purpose method of collaboration.