Industrial Symbiosis: Context-Aware Strategies for Automated Negotiation of Smart Contracts in Peer-to-Peer Markets of Prosumers

Abstract

Industrial Symbiosis can evolve from a simple concept to a revolutionary practical approach where prosumer companies produce goods and provide services through automated negotiation of Smart Contracts by means of new technologies like Internet-of-Things (IoTs) and Blockchain in a Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Market. However, a symbiotic scheme of prosumers exchanging utility surpluses and industrial services gives rise to a great challenge: each company will only participate in the market if the motivation of increasing its own profits exists. I n t his work, each prosumer company is represented by a software agent that resorts to previously learned context-aware strategies for defining prior distributions. Then, strategies are adapted to different opponents when negotiating utility contracts by properly accounting for opponents’ preferences (private) and key contextual (public) information. Agents negotiating Smart Contracts can be readily implemented using Distributed Applications (dApps) over Ethereum/Solidity and digital currencies as the Ether.