Digitalization represents a fundamental transformation in how we process information and conduct negotiations. It refines existing workflows, improves efficiency, enhances customer experience, and allows for better collaboration within ecosystems, promoting industrial sustainability and circularity.

The control and storage of digitalized systems are traditionally centralized, requiring trust in a third party in charge of processing data associated with negotiations, determining the outcome, and storing it. However, this centralized entity may not be trustworthy, as it may favor a particular party or misuse the information it processes. To meet this, there is a trend towards decentralized models. Recently, blockchain systems and Distributed Hash Tables (DHT) have gained popularity for decentralized transaction processing, and storage. While these systems offer many advantages for creating decentralized interactions and storing data, they need extensions to support negotiations as they are typically designed for executing single transactions rather than iteratively negotiating in time-constrained settings. Furthermore, decentralized data storage systems often do not support bidirectional relationships, capturing the need for event tracing in supply chains.

The scope of this thesis is the digitalization of negotiation mechanisms and data storage systems in the context of the circular economy. The early part focuses on designing price-only and multi-attribute open-cry auctioning systems and automating digitalized negotiations. This includes identifying key properties and features in open-cry auctioning systems and contract establishment procedures, consisting of machine and human-readable agreements. Additionally, the work on digitalized contract establishment extends to the representation of rights and obligations in access control. Then, various decentralized approaches are analyzed for transitioning open-cry auctions to decentralized models. From this, a system design for a decentralized auction system based on blockchain is presented, along with an implementation using Hyperledger Fabric. The latter part of the paper explores how decentralized systems can effectively represent and query highly interconnected data. It presents a solution using the Interplanetary File System (IPFS) to address these challenges. Furthermore, the implementation is extended to the realm of sustainability by examining Digital Product Passports.

The results of the work presented in this thesis show the potential of digitalized negotiations for the agreement of rights and obligations in access control and open-cry auctions and the limitations of their implementation using blockchain technologies. Lastly, it demonstrates the use of IPFS for storing and linking data and its ability to enable traceability and accountability throughout product lifecycles.