ACQUA: aplicação de contratos com qualidade, utilizando arquitetura blockchain

Abstract

Water is an essential and irreplaceable resource for human survival and environmental balance. The process of water revitalization—understood as the set of steps for treating, purifying, and reintroducing treated effluents into the environment—is fundamental to ensuring the sustainability of water resources. Like any strategic asset, water maintenance and revitalization activities require rigorous and transparent management of the contracts and services involved, in order to prevent fraud, falsification, and administrative irregularities. However, sanitation companies face recurring challenges in the traceability of contractual information, since data is dispersed across multiple systems and formats, hindering audits and compromising document integrity. In this context, blockchain technology emerges as a promising alternative, offering reliability, authenticity, integrity, immutability, and transparency to digital transactions. This paper presents the specification and development of a decentralized application (Dapp) aimed at managing and orchestrating smart contracts applied to the sanitation sector, especially in the context of contracting goods and services for water treatment and revitalization. The objective is to evaluate the applicability of how a permissioned blockchain network can ensure traceability and trust at each stage of the contractual cycle, from drafting to execution and automated auditing. The research was conducted based on the Design Science Research Methodology (DSRM), structured in four main stages: (1) problem identification and literature review, based on publications indexed in the IEEE, Elsevier, and MDPI databases; (2) definition of research objectives and questions; (3) design and development of the artifact—a decentralized application and a blockchain-based backend; and (4) evaluation of the artifact through simulated test cases in a blockchain environment. The results obtained demonstrate the technical feasibility of applying blockchain to the management of sanitation contracts, proving the potential of this technology to reduce fraud risks, improve institutional transparency, and increase the efficiency of audit processes. Furthermore, the study reinforces the scientific value of integrating blockchain and digital governance, offering a solid foundation for future research on the combined use of blockchain and artificial intelligence in water resource management and public contracts.