Ricardian Contracts for Industry 4.0 via the Arrowhead Contract Proxy

Abstract

Industry 4.0 will require unprecedented degrees of integration across organizational boundaries, which will put new demands on infrastructure for managing agreements between industrial stakeholders. In this paper, we present a system-of-systems architecture for cross-organizational negotiation of Ricardian contracts. We also describe our implementation of it, based on Eclipse Arrowhead, and how it can produce non-repudiable contracts between local clouds, potentially owned by distinct parties. We discuss how our architecture could impact current business paradigms, as well as arguing that our design, in contrast to most solutions based on smart contracts, avoids to deviate significantly from contemporary legal praxis, which should create better opportunity for industry adoption.