A Time-Aware Model for Legal Smart Contracts

Smart Contracts that embody real world legal contracts require not only a sound and secure implementation but also a careful analysis of the underlying contractual commitments. Temporal clauses are abundant in contracts, requiring permissions and obligations to be executed in temporal relationships with observed events. Before signing a contract a thorough analysis, whether breaches of temporal clauses are imminent, whether all temporal obligations can be fulfilled are inevitable to avoid the cost of violating temporal commitments. We present a contract model that focuses on modeling temporal commitments explicitly. And we present techniques based on these contract models to analyze the temporal properties of contracts, in particular, whether a party can guarantee to fulfill all temporal commitments under all foreseeable circumstances. We present a framework that supports the development and negotiation of contracts precluding the risk of violating temporal clauses.