Related papers: Contracts for Abstract Processes in Service Compos…
Structural causal models (SCMs) are a widespread formalism to deal with causal systems. A recent direction of research has considered the problem of relating formally SCMs at different levels of abstraction, by defining maps between SCMs…
Many-to-many matching with contracts is studied in the framework of revealed preferences. All preferences are described by choice functions that satisfy natural conditions. Under a no-externality assumption individual preferences can be…
This paper introduces abstractions that are meaningful for computers and that can be built and used according to computers' own criteria, i.e., computable abstractions. It is analyzed how abstractions can be seen to serve as the building…
In David Schmidt's PhD work he explored the use of denotational semantics as a programming language. It was part of an effort to not only treat formal semantics as specifications but also as interpreters and input to compiler generators.…
Contracts underlie most modern commercial transactions defining define the duties and obligations of the related parties in an agreement. Ensuring such agreements are error free is crucial for modern society and their analysis of a contract…
Smart contracts are computer programs that can be consistently executed by a network of mutually distrusting nodes, without the arbitration of a trusted authority. Because of their resilience to tampering, smart contracts are appealing in…
Web service composition is the process of synthesizing a new composite service using a set of available Web services in order to satisfy a client request that cannot be treated by any available Web services. The Web services space is a…
Software deployment can turn into a baffling problem when the components being deployed exhibit non-functional requirements. If the platform on which such components are deployed cannot satisfy their non-functional requirements, then they…
Distributed algorithms solving agreement problems like consensus or state machine replication are essential components of modern fault-tolerant distributed services. They are also notoriously hard to understand and reason about. Their…
In cooperative human decision-making, agreements are often not total; a partial degree of agreement is sufficient to commit to a decision and move on, as long as one is somewhat confident that the involved parties are likely to stand by…
Autonomous systems typically leverage layered control architectures with a combination of discrete and continuous models operating at different timescales. As a result, layered systems form a new class of hybrid systems composed of systems…
Reusable software components need expressive specifications. This paper outlines a rigorous foundation to model-based contracts, a method to equip classes with strong contracts that support accurate design, implementation, and formal…
With the ever increasing importance of web services and the Cloud as a reliable commodity to provide business value as well as consolidate IT infrastructure, electronic contracts have become very important. WS-Agreement has itself…
Causal abstraction provides a theory describing how several causal models can represent the same system at different levels of detail. Existing theoretical proposals limit the analysis of abstract models to "hard" interventions fixing…
At its core, abstraction is the process of generalizing from specific instances to broader concepts or models, with the primary objective of reducing complexity while preserving properties essential to the intended purpose. It is…
Consensus is an often occurring problem in concurrent and distributed programming. We present a programming language with simple semantics and build-in support for consensus in the form of communicating transactions. We motivate the need…
We present a first approximation of agent behaviour in a generalized model in contract theory. This model relaxes some of the the assumptions of one of the classical models allowing to include a broader range of agents. We introduce the…
We present a process algebra based approach to formalize the interactions of computing devices such as the representation of policies and the resolution of conflicts. As an example we specify how promises may be used in coming to an…
The composition of web services is a promising approach enabling flexible and loose integration of business applications. Numerous approaches related to web services composition have been developed usually following three main phases: the…
Approximations during program analysis are a necessary evil, as they ensure essential properties, such as soundness and termination of the analysis, but they also imply not always producing useful results. Automatic techniques have been…