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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Carlos Molina-Jimenez, Emeritus Professor Santosh Shrivastava, Dr Ellis SolaimanORCiD, John Warne
Converting a conventional contract into an electronic equivalent that can be executed and enforced by computers is a challenging task. The difficulties are caused by the ambiguities that the original human-oriented text is likely to contain. The conversion process involves the conversion of the original text into mathematical notation. This paper discusses how standard conventional contracts can be described by means of Finite State Machines (FSMs). This mathematical description helps eliminate ambiguities from the original text before the contract is coded into a computer program. The paper describes how to map the rights and obligations extracted from the clauses of the contract into the states, transition and output functions, and input and output symbols of a FSM. The FSM representation can be used to guarantee that the clauses stipulated in the contract are observed when the contract is executed. The paper describes the middleware required for the enactment of the contract represented as a FSM.
Author(s): Molina-Jimenez C, Shrivastava SK, Solaiman E, Warne JP
Publication type: Report
Publication status: Published
Series Title: School of Computing Science Technical Report Series
Year: 2003
Pages: 11
Print publication date: 01/07/2003
Source Publication Date: July 2003
Report Number: 810
Institution: School of Computing Science, University of Newcastle upon Tyne
Place Published: Newcastle upon Tyne
URL: http://www.cs.ncl.ac.uk/publications/trs/papers/810.pdf
