Smart Contract Negotiation in Cloud Computing

Abstract

A smart contract is the formalisation of an agreement, whose terms are automatically enforced by relying on a transaction protocol, while minimising the need of intermediaries. Such contracts not only specify the service and its quality but also the possible changes at runtime of the terms of agreement. Although smart contracts provide a great deal of flexibility, analysing their compatibility and reaching agreements with this level of dynamism is considerably more challenging, due to the freedom of clients and providers in formulating needs/offers. We introduce a formal language to specify interactions between offers and requests and present a methodology for the autonomous negotiation of smart contracts, which analyses the cost and the necessary changes for reaching an agreement. Moreover, we describe a set of experiments that provides insights on the relative cost of dynamism in negotiating smart contracts and compare the request/offer matching rates of our solution with related works.