A Practical System Architecture for Contract Automation: Design and Uses

TL;DR

This paper proposes a practical system architecture that adapts traditional Ricardian contracts for blockchain-based automation, addressing legal and usability issues to enable fully digital, automatable contract management.

Contribution

It introduces an architecture integrating Ricardian contracts with blockchain technologies, facilitating legal-compliant, user-friendly, and automatable contract processes in various industrial applications.

Findings

Enables digital contract negotiation and execution with legal compliance.

Supports use cases like private data purchasing and automated device onboarding.

Reduces blockchain legal and operational complexities.

Abstract

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 application. These shortcomings come from (1) that a smart contract is a computer program, not a document describing legal obligations, and (2) that blockchain-based systems are complicated to use and operate. In this paper, we present a refined and extended summary of our work taking key technologies from the blockchain sphere and applying them to the ricardian contract, which is a traditional contract in digital form with machine-readable parameters. By putting the ricardian contract in the context of our contract network architecture, we facilitate the infrastructure required for contracts to be offered, negotiated, performed, renegotiated and terminated in a completely digital and automatable fashion. Our architecture circumvents the legal issues of blockchains by facilitating an artifact very much alike a traditional contract, as well as its operational complexity by requiring consensus only between nodes representing directly involved parties. To demonstrate its utility, we also present how it could be used for (1) private data purchasing, (2) treasury management, (3) order-driven manufacturing and (4) automated device on-boarding.