Semantic Contract Meshes for Dynamic Partner Orchestration Across Multi-Enterprise Cloud Ecosystems
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Abstract
Multi-enterprise cloud ecosystems need a coordinated and accelerated approach to onboard, coordinate, and replace partners, that conventional bilateral integration agreements cannot keep up with. This systematic literature review aims to describe and assess the semantic contract mesh, a decentralized layer that is characterized by the binding of machine-interpretable agreements to shared ontologies, enforcement through zero-trust policy points, and execution through verifiable workflow models, and that has been published from 1990 to 2021. Sources were rated on six weighted criteria and put into 7 themes with five having at least 4 sources. Three latency regimes are suggested along with a formal contract tuple, a weighted Jaccard compatibility measure and a Petri net state equation. Comparative scoring gives the mesh a weighted 2.75 out of 3.00 points while point-to-point integration gets a 0.65. With an illustrative parameterization, mesh latency is 38.0ms at 50 partners, while pairwise integration takes 1,225ms. Latencies and scores are analytic, not experimental. In just 8 of the 42 theme–capability cells, the maximum code is achieved, revealing fragmentation across the literature. Ethical, regulatory and scalability challenges are explored, and a phased, ontology-first approach to adoption for enterprises seeking to incrementally move from bilateral integration to shared machine-interpretable agreements is proposed.
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