Related papers: Contracts as specifications for dynamical systems …

Contracts are an essential and fundamental component of commerce and society, serving to clarify agreement between multiple parties. While digital technologies have helped to automate many activities associated with contracting, the…

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…

Design-by-contract is an important technique for model-based design in which a composite system is specified by a collection of contracts that specify the behavioural assumptions and guarantees of each component. In this paper, we describe…

We take a divide and conquer approach to design controllers for reachability problems given large-scale linear systems with polyhedral constraints on states, controls, and disturbances. Such systems are made of small subsystems with coupled…

As autonomy becomes prevalent in many applications, ranging from recommendation systems to fully autonomous vehicles, there is an increased need to provide safety guarantees for such systems. The problem is difficult, as these are large,…

We discuss for the concept of promises within a framework that can be applied to either humans or technology. We compare promises to the more established notion of obligations and find promises to be both simpler and more effective at…

Perception contracts provide a method for evaluating safety of control systems that use machine learning for perception. A perception contract is a specification for testing the ML components, and it gives a method for proving end-to-end…

This paper proposes a novel continuous-time dynamic contract framework that has a risk-limiting capability. If a principal and an agent enter into such a contract, the principal can optimally manage its performance and risk with a guarantee…

In this position paper, we consider some foundational topics regarding smart contracts (such as terminology, automation, enforceability, and semantics) and define a smart contract as an automatable and enforceable agreement. We explore a…

In this paper, we focus on the problem of compositional synthesis of controllers enforcing signal temporal logic (STL) tasks over a class of continuous-time nonlinear interconnected systems. By leveraging the idea of funnel-based control,…

The nature of Systems of Systems (SoSs), large complex systems composed of independent, geographically distributed and continuously evolving constituent systems, means that faults are unavoidable. Previous work on defining contractual…

Today's control systems are often characterized by modularity and safety requirements to handle complexity, resulting in hierarchical control structures. Although hierarchical model predictive control offers favorable properties, achieving…

In a series of recent work, we have introduced a general framework for quantitative reasoning in specification theories. The contribution of this paper is to show how this framework can be applied to yield a robust specification theory for…

Contracts are a form of lightweight formal specification embedded in the program text. Being executable parts of the code, they encourage programmers to devote proper attention to specifications, and help maintain consistency between…

The paper outlines ongoing research on logic-based tools for the analysis and representation of legal contracts of the kind frequently encountered in large-scale engineering projects and complex, long-term trading agreements. We consider…

We present the algebra of assume-guarantee (AG) contracts. We define contracts, provide new as well as known operations, and show how these operations are related. Contracts are functorial: any Boolean algebra has an associated contract…

We consider the problem of reasoning about networked and layered control systems using assume-guarantee specifications. As these systems are formed by the interconnection of components that operate under various clocks, we introduce a new…

We consider the decentralized control of a discrete-time, linear system subject to exogenous disturbances and polyhedral constraints on the state and input trajectories. The underlying system is composed of a finite collection of…

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…

I analyze long-term contracting in insurance markets with asymmetric information. The buyer privately observes her risk type, which evolves stochastically over time. A long-term contract specifies a menu of insurance policies, contingent on…