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Automatically running experiments on checking multi-party contracts

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Abstract

Contracts play an important role in business management where relationships among different parties are dictated by legal rules. Electronic contracts have emerged mostly due to technological advances and electronic trading between companies and customers. New challenges have then arisen to guarantee reliability among the stakeholders in electronic negotiations. In this scenario, automatic verification of electronic contracts appeared as an imperative support, specially the conflict detection task of multi-party contracts. The problem of checking contracts has been largely addressed in the literature, but there are few, if any, methods and practical tools that can deal with multi-party contracts using a contract language with deontic and dynamic aspects as well as relativizations, over the same formalism. In this work we present an automatic checker for finding conflicts on multi-party contracts modeled by an extended contract language with deontic operators and relativizations. Moreover a well-known case study of sales contract is modeled and automatically verified by our tool. Further, we performed practical experiments in order to evaluate the efficiency of our method and the practical tool.

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Notes

  1. Relativized Contract Language.

  2. \({\mathbf {R}}\)elativiz\({\mathbf {E}}\)d \({\mathbf {C}}\)ontr\({\mathbf {A}}\)ct \({\mathbf {L}}\)anguage ana\({\mathbf {L}}\)yser

  3. The use of penalties and reparations obviate the need for explicit discussion of issues relating to contrary to duty and contrary to prohibition.

  4. Available at http://recallcontracts.github.io.

  5. http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/pt/java/javase.

  6. http://www.antlr.org.

  7. https://commons.apache.org/proper/commons-cli.

  8. https://github.com/google/guava.

  9. http://www.graphviz.org.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Computing Department, University of Londrina, Londrina, PR, Brazil

    Adilson Luiz Bonifacio & Wellington Aparecido Della Mura

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  1. Adilson Luiz Bonifacio
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  2. Wellington Aparecido Della Mura
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Correspondence to Adilson Luiz Bonifacio.

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Bonifacio, A.L., Della Mura, W.A. Automatically running experiments on checking multi-party contracts. Artif Intell Law 29, 287–310 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10506-020-09276-y

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