Towards Automated Contract Handling

Starting from an example from the energy balancing domain within a network of trustful, but independent companies, we argue that the automation of the contract fulfillment, taking advantage of the potentials of smart contracts, provides the starting point for a more complete approach of an automated contract handling. Therefore, the research areas of automated negotiations (including the elicitation of negotiation strategies) and smart contracting, i.e. the automated creation of smart contracts, can be combined, to enable automation of the contracting and the contract fulfillment.