Architectures for Automated Contractual Cooperation

Sammanfattning: 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 present our efforts to formulate architectures meant to facilitate automatable and general-purpose collaborations. While we have worked with the needs of the supply chain and manufacturing industries at the forefront, we believe our results to be generally applicable. The two architectures we outline in this paper, the Exchange Network Architecture and the Contract Network Architecture, were made while taking design cues from blockchains, Ricardian contracts, e-contracts, multi-agent systems, among other technologies. Both of our architectures can produce trails of non-repudiable proofs of consent, which can make them legally compliant in many parts of the world.To put our work into context, we (1) introduce it, (2) describe Industry 4.0 and the requirements it imposes on any system for digital contracting, (3) give a brief history and overview of distributed ledger technologies, (4) outline what systems modeling is and how it relates to our architectures, (5) summarize the scientific publications we authored as part of this work, as well as (6) present the conclusions we derive from it. In the second part of the thesis we present our work by including our publications verbatim.