Relying on E-Contracting and Smart Contracts to Facilitate Legally Enforceable Conformance Checking in Collaborative Production

Close collaboration and horizontal integration between value chain participants during collaborative production execution provide them with new possibilities and mutual benefits, resulting in improved operational and business performance. With our previous work, we introduced a novel methodological approach that facilitates runtime monitoring in collaborative networks based on Distributed Ledger Technology. In this approach, smart contracts are used to define and enforce process monitoring and conformance-checking logic for finding commonalities and discrepancies between the contracted and observed behavior during collaborative production execution. However, as smart contracts as tools can not be considered legally binding agreements, the collaborating parties still must go through the bureaucratic hurdle of defining the same conformance-checking logic within textual agreements. In this paper, we present the adaptation of the methodological approach that relies on e-contracting processes and activities to make the logic implemented with smart contracts legally enforceable. The benefits of this adaptation are that it speeds up the establishment of collaborative networks and further promotes trustworthy collaboration. Along with presenting the adaptation of the approach, we describe its implementation.