Electronic contracting in aircraft aftercare: a case study

Distributed systems comprised of autonomous self-interested entities require some sort of control mechanism to ensure the predictability of the interactions that drive them. This is certainly true in the aerospace domain, where manufacturers, suppliers and operators must coordinate their activities to maximise safety and profit, for example. To address this need, the notion of norms has been proposed which, when incorporated into formal electronic documents, allow for the specification and deployment of contract-driven systems. In this context, we describe the CONTRACT framework and architecture for exactly this purpose, and describe a concrete instantiation of this architecture as a prototype system applied to an aerospace aftercare scenario.