A Mapping Review on Cyber-Physical Smart Contracts: Architectures, Platforms, and Challenges

Abstract

Smart contracts are software systems that monitor, automate, and control the execution of a process, react to violations, and enforce process terms and conditions. There is tremendous interest in developing smart contract applications in banking, finance, insurance, government, and supply chain markets. Many of these applications operate in a cyber-physical environment and adopt architectures based on Internet-of-Things (IoT) and blockchain technologies to support monitoring and ensure data integrity. To investigate how cyber-physical smart contracts are realized for compliance monitoring, together with associated challenges and research opportunities. A mapping review of the literature that surveys underlying architectures and their evaluation. The publications considered came from four databases (Scopus, Web of Science, IEEE Xplore, and Google Scholar), supplemented by manual snowballing. All publications considered are peer-reviewed, written in English, and published in non-predatory venues. A total of 368 publications were considered, with a final selection of 50 papers (all published between 2018 and 2023) that were analyzed along three dimensions: Cyber-physical architectures, infrastructure failures, and technical challenges. Blockchain technologies are the most commonly used platform for smart contracts as they provide decentralized architectures deploying interesting communication patterns, as well as multiple technologies to simplify communication for producing and consuming events. Moreover, such architectures can lead to many types of infrastructure failures including sensor/actuator attacks, network outages, and hardware/software failures, resulting in five important technical challenge areas related to security, availability, robustness, privacy, and legal aspects. Key insights and directions for future research are also reported. This review will inform readers about how cyber-physical smart contracts are being built and deployed and the challenges that are faced by their builders and users.

Keywords

• Smart contracts
• cyber-physical systems
• blockchain
• compliance monitoring
• events
• platforms