9,000 research outputs found

    Contracts for Interacting Two-Party Systems

    Full text link
    This article deals with the interrelation of deontic operators in contracts -- an aspect often neglected when considering only one of the involved parties. On top of an automata-based semantics we formalise the onuses that obligations, permissions and prohibitions on one party impose on the other. Such formalisation allows for a clean notion of contract strictness and a derived notion of contract conflict that is enriched with issues arising from party interdependence.Comment: In Proceedings FLACOS 2012, arXiv:1209.169

    Factors that Impact Blockchain Scalability

    Get PDF

    Challenges in the specification of full contracts

    Get PDF
    Partially supported by the Nordunet3 project “COSoDIS”.The complete specification of full contracts - contracts which include tolerated exceptions, and which enable reasoning about the contracts themselves, can be achieved using a combination of temporal and deontic concepts. In this paper we discuss the challenges in combining deontic and other relevant logics, in particular focusing on operators for choice, obligations over sequences, contrary-to-duty obligations, and how internal and external decisions may be incorporated in an action-based language for specifying contracts. We provide different viable interpretations and approaches for the development of such a sound logic and outline challenges for the future.peer-reviewe

    Intelligent contracts and the construction industry

    Get PDF
    Advances in technology have resulted in a fast changing landscape for construction contracts. Lawyers struggle to keep up with the pace of innovation and the need to provide legal solutions and accommodate new approaches. Building Information Modelling (BIM) has become part of the common parlance in construction notwithstanding limited evidence of its impact on the ground... Intelligent contracts appear as a logical extension to BIM whereby the contractual performance itself becomes automated. However, intelligent contracts work best where they are short term or are of instantaneous effect. This is at odds with the complicated and long-running nature of construction projects. Further, storage constraints, compatibility and reliability issues together with confidentiality and the long term nature of distributed ledgers pose additional problems. The aim of this paper is to present the debate about what could be achieved in the construction industry by the adoption of intelligent contracts. An on-line forum provided the secondary data on which the discussion is based. The objectives are to introduce aspects of technological advancement within commerce generally and to discuss their application in construction. The hypothesis advanced is that certain aspects of the construction contract cannot be fully intelligent and the best that can be achieved in the short to medium term is a semi-automated position. Further, intelligent contracts should be viewed as part of the BIM-led revolution in construction and not separate from it. The recommendation is that incremental advances such as the coding of project management and contract administration data be targeted to provide improved operational efficiency and value savings

    Verification of loop parallelisations

    Get PDF
    Writing correct parallel programs becomes more and more difficult as the complexity and heterogeneity of processors increase. This issue is addressed by parallelising compilers. Various compiler directives can be used to tell these compilers where to parallelise. This paper addresses the correctness of such compiler directives for loop parallelisation. Specifically, we propose a technique based on separation logic to verify whether a loop can be parallelised. Our approach requires each loop iteration to be specified with the locations that are read and written in this iteration. If the specifications are correct, they can be used to draw conclusions about loop (in)dependences. Moreover, they also reveal where synchronisation is needed in the parallelised program. The loop iteration specifications can be verified using permission-based separation logic and seamlessly integrate with functional behaviour specifications. We formally prove the correctness of our approach and we discuss automated tool support for our technique. Additionally, we also discuss how the loop iteration contracts can be compiled into specifications for the code coming out of the parallelising compiler

    Synthesising implicit contracts

    Get PDF
    In regulated interactive systems, one party’s behaviour may impose restrictions on how others may behave when interacting with it. These restrictions may be seen as implicit contracts which the affected party has to conform to and may thus be considered inappropriate or excessive if they overregulate one of the parties. In, we have characterised such implicit contracts and present an algorithmic way of synthesising them using a formalism based on contract automata to regulate interactive action-based systems. In this presentation, we outline the problem and future extensions of the work we are currently exploring.peer-reviewe

    Dealing with the hypothetical in contracts

    Get PDF
    The notion of a contract as an agreement regulating the behaviour of two (or more) parties has long been studied, with most work focusing on the interaction between the contract and the parties. This view limits the analysis of contracts as first-class entities — which can be studied independently of the parties they regulate. Deontic logic [1] has long sought to take a contract-centric view, but has been marred with problems arising from paradoxes and practical oddities [2]. Within the field of computer science, the holy grail of contracts is that of a deontic logic sufficiently expressive to enable reasoning about real-life contracts but sufficiently restricted to avoid paradoxes and to be computationally tractable. Contract automata [3–5] have been proposed as a way of expressing the expected behaviour of interacting systems, encompassing the deontic notions of obligation, prohibition and permission. For instance, the contract automaton shown in Fig. 1 expresses the contract which states that ‘the client is permitted to initialise a service, after which, he or she is obliged to submit valid user credentials and the provider is prohibited from increasing the price of the service.’ Note that the states are tagged with the deontic information, explicitly stating what actions are obliged (O), permitted (P) and forbidden (F) by which party (given in the subscript). The transitions are tagged with actions which when taken by the parties induce a change of state, with ∗ being used as shorthand to denote anything-else.peer-reviewe

    Habitual accountability routines in the boardroom: How boards balance control and collaboration

    Get PDF
    open3siCorporate accountability is a complex chain of reporting that reaches from external stakeholders into the organization’s management structure. The transition from external to internal accountability mechanisms primarily occurs at the board of directors. Yet outside of incentive mechanisms, we know surprisingly little about how internal actors (management) are held to account by the representatives of external shareholders (the board). This paper explores the process of accountability at this transition point by documenting the routines used by boards to hold the firm’s management to account. In so doing we develop our understanding of the important transition between internal and external firm accountability.embargoed_20190401Nicholson, Gavin; Pugliese, Amedeo; Bezemer, Pieter JanNicholson, Gavin; Pugliese, Amedeo; Bezemer, Pieter Ja

    Types of rights in interacting two-party systems : a formal analysis

    Get PDF
    Partially founded by UBACyT 20020090200116 and UBACyT 20020100200103.We present a formalization of Kanger’s types of rights in the context of interacting two-party systems, such as contracts. We show that in this setting basic rights such as claim, freedom, power and immunity can be expressed in terms of (possibly negated) permissions and obligations over presence or absense of actions, and that the set of atomic type rights is different from Kanger’s original proposal.peer-reviewe
    • …
    corecore