Themulus: A Timed Contract-calculus

Over these past years, formal reasoning about contracts between parties has been increasingly explored in the literature. There has been a shift of view from that viewing contracts simply as properties to be satisfied by the parties to contracts as first class syntactic objects which can be reasoned about independently of the parties’ behaviour. In this paper, we present a real-time deontic contract calculus, Themulus, to reason about contracts, abstracting the parties’ behaviour through the use of a simulation relation. In doing so, we can compare real-time deontic contracts in terms of their strictness over permissions, prohibitions and obligations.