Abstract
Legal contracts specify obligations and powers among legal subjects, involve assets, and are subject to quality constraints. Smart contracts are software systems that monitor the execution of contracts to ensure compliance. As a starting point for developing software engineering concepts, tools, and techniques for smart contracts, we have proposed Symboleo, a formal specification language for contracts. The complexity of real-life contracts (e.g., in the construction and transportation industries) requires specification languages to support execution-time operations for contracts, such as subcontracting, assignment, delegation, and substitution. This paper formalizes such concepts by proposing for them a syntax and axiomatic semantics within Symboleo. This formalization makes use of primitive operations that support the transfer or sharing of right, responsibility, and performance among contracting and subcontracting parties. A prototype compliance checking tool for Symboleo has also been created to support monitoring compliance for contracts that include subcontracting aspects. A realistic freight contract specified in Symboleo is provided as an illustrative example for our proposal, and is used for a preliminary evaluation with positive results.
Partially funded by an NSERC Strategic Partnership Grant titled “Middleware Framework and Programming Infrastructure for IoT Services” and by SSHRC’s Partnership Grant “Autonomy Through Cyberjustice Technologies”.
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Notes
- 1.
From the Greek word \(\varSigma \upsilon \mu \beta o\lambda \alpha \iota o\), meaning contract and pronounced ‘simvoleo’.
- 2.
The tool is available at https://sites.google.com/uottawa.ca/csmlab.
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Acknowledgment
The authors thank E. Jonchères, V. Callipel, D. Restrepo Amariles, P. Bacquero, F. Gélinas, G. Sileno, T. van Engers, and T. van Binsbergen (lawyers and professors from the Autonomy Through Cyberjustice Technologies project) for their feedback on Symboleo and guidance on subcontracting, as well as A. Roudak for his feedback on our compliance checker.
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Parvizimosaed, A., Sharifi, S., Amyot, D., Logrippo, L., Mylopoulos, J. (2020). Subcontracting, Assignment, and Substitution for Legal Contracts in Symboleo. In: Dobbie, G., Frank, U., Kappel, G., Liddle, S.W., Mayr, H.C. (eds) Conceptual Modeling. ER 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12400. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62522-1_20
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