Tradesmen approach estimating with the aim of creating a quotation. They know what they can accomplish in a time period, say a day or an hour and they know the resources, like paint or plaster, that they will consume in a period, depending on the task. So, as they walk around a prospective job, they divide it into different tasks and assess how much time each task will take.
Could this process be expressed as a contract or perhaps as a set of contracts? The tradesman is to receive whatever he quotes, if he gets the job, and will be obliged to purchase the material resources he will need for its accomplishment. He may even be obliged to hire a sub-contractor for part of the work.
Could Marlowe be used to describe such an estimate? If so it would have wide application, across a good variety of estimating work.
Marlowe sits on top of Plutus and is a domain-specific language (DSL). It is used to map a certain class of financial contracts.
Your example does not fit into this class. You would need a general-purpose language like Plutus to implement it.
So, to answer your question, it is doable only in Plutus not in Marlowe, the challenge in this example: who and how is the external evaluation carried out, which the contract itself cannot perform.
In the example, the tradesman estimates the times he or others will take for each component task and the code multiplies that out by the stored formulas and factors to get a final cost, which tells him what to quote. Just math. Thanks for responding. Can be applied to scaffolding estimating, to give a very different example.
The method depends on the central, simplifying idea that any given trademan can only use resources at his given rate of application, thus giving one all the various resource quantities just from that tradesman’s times. Got it?
I once worked on estimating software, maintaining and developing it for a small sign making business. It was a custom package based on MS Access. It’s an interesting application in general terms, but I don’t see smart contracts as being of particular benefit here. Probably simplest to do the estimates using existing methods and then just replace the normal client and supplier contracts with smart ones as appropriate.
Thank you for the clarification. I guess I was overthinking this a bit with an escrow like contract in mind that should automatically release funds on certain points.
Good day! I am new to this space. Your idea is perfect to start a process. There are points to clarity and yet to keep simple for multi uses. Project#1 may have many bid contracts, with a Project#1-WatcherLogic to advise the Project#1 owner that the project’s specifications should be in review. A “Smart Contract” should be smart! Normal logic assumed, but “smart” to me means more than a simple decision tree. The project is to run the smart-contracts not the smart-contracts going to the fastest cheapest contractors. I envision smart contracts driven by … Sorry for the long-winded thought. Have a nice day.
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