Related papers: Contracts for Abstract Processes in Service Compos…
Contract theory studies how a principal can incentivize agents to exert costly, unobservable effort through performance-based payments. While classical economic models provide elegant characterizations of optimal solutions, modern…
Smart contracts are computer programs that are executed by a network of mutually distrusting agents, without the need of an external trusted authority. Smart contracts handle and transfer assets of considerable value (in the form of…
Abstraction of operation processes is a fundamental step for simulation modeling. To reliably abstract an operation process, modelers rely on text information to study and understand details of operations. Aiming at reducing modelers'…
The goal of this report is to define abstractions for multi-agent systems with feedback interconnection in their dynamics. In the proposed decentralized framework, we specify a finite or countable transition system for each agent which only…
Reinforcement learning defines the problem facing agents that learn to make good decisions through action and observation alone. To be effective problem solvers, such agents must efficiently explore vast worlds, assign credit from delayed…
We propose a formal model for distributed systems, where each participant advertises its requirements and obligations as behavioural contracts, and where multiparty sessions are started when a set of contracts allows to synthesise a…
Recursive relational specifications are commonly used to describe the computational structure of formal systems. Recent research in proof theory has identified two features that facilitate direct, logic-based reasoning about such…
This paper discusses the problem of abstracting conditional probabilistic actions. We identify two distinct types of abstraction: intra-action abstraction and inter-action abstraction. We define what it means for the abstraction of an…
We investigate how contracts can be used to regulate the interaction between processes. To do that, we study a variant of the concurrent constraints calculus presented in [1], featuring primitives for multi-party synchronization via…
Verbs play an important role in the understanding of natural language text. This paper studies the problem of abstracting the subject and object arguments of a verb into a set of noun concepts, known as the "argument concepts". This set of…
We develop a general framework for agent abstraction based on the situation calculus and the ConGolog agent programming language. We assume that we have a high-level specification and a low-level specification of the agent, both represented…
Contract-based design is a method to facilitate modular system design. While there has been substantial progress on the theory of contracts, there has been less progress on scalable algorithms for the algebraic operations in this theory. In…
We define robust abstractions for synthesizing provably correct and robust controllers for (possibly infinite) uncertain transition systems. It is shown that robust abstractions are sound in the sense that they preserve robust satisfaction…
This paper formulates and studies the concepts of approximate (alternating) bisimulation relations characterizing equivalence relations between interconnected systems and their abstractions. These equivalence relations guarantee that the…
The actor model eases the definition of concurrent programs with non uniform behaviors. Static analysis of such a model was previously done in a data-flow oriented way, with type systems. This approach was based on constraint set resolution…
Abstraction is one of the fundamental concepts of software design. Consequently, the determination of an appropriate abstraction level for the multitude of artefacts that form a software system is an integral part of software engineering.…
Modeling and analysis of interactions among services is a crucial issue in Service-Oriented Computing. Composing Web services is a complicated task which requires techniques and tools to verify that the new system will behave correctly. In…
We show that the operations of composition and merging of contracts are part of the tensor product structure of the algebra of contracts.
In this paper, we develop a compositional scheme for the construction of continuous approximations for interconnections of infinitely many discrete-time switched systems. An approximation (also known as abstraction) is itself a…
The tasks of semantic web service (discovery, selection, composition, and execution) are supposed to enable seamless interoperation between systems, whereby human intervention is kept at a minimum. In the field of Web service description…