Emanuel Palm

I Investigate architectures and solutions for digitized industrial collaboration, with emphasis on non-repudiable negotiation outcomes and smart contracts for industrial automation.

The Internet of Contracts

The manufacturing and supply chain industries are currently approaching a major paradigm shift. Coined the fourth industrial revolution, it entails the digital interconnection of existing and new smart devices, enabling unprecedented degrees of automatic product customization, life-cycle management and data exploitation.

However, for these benefits to become a reality, legal and financial infrastructure must exist that can support the pace and resolution of the processes that are to be connected. Payments, component orders, as well as other legal commitments, must make a definite transition from papers to completely digital forms, without loosing the ability to use courts of law or risking degredations in the reliability or flexibility of the medium.

My work largely consists of taking significant research results from the blockchain, Internet-of-Things and Smart Contract communities, and turning these into concrete architectures. The first major contribution is the Exchange Network Architecture, which allows distinct stakeholders to exchange digital tokens, representing arbitrary commitments, without trusted intermediaries. Work is currently on-going to improve this architecture to make it better align with contemporary contractual practices and provide better support for smart contract automation.

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