Related papers: Contracts as specifications for dynamical systems …

With an increasing degree of automation, automated vehicle systems become more complex in terms of functional components as well as interconnected hardware and software components. Thus, holistic systems engineering becomes a severe…

Autonomous driving vehicles provide a vast potential for realizing use cases in the on-road and off-road domains. Consequently, remarkable solutions exist to autonomous systems' environmental perception and control. Nevertheless, proof of…

This work addresses the design of multi-agent coordination through high-order consensus protocols. While first-order consensus strategies are well-studied -- with known robustness to uncertainties such as time delays, time-varying weights,…

Contraction theory is a mathematical framework for studying the convergence, robustness, and modularity properties of dynamical systems and algorithms. In this opinion paper, we provide five main opinions on the virtues of contraction…

This paper proposes a method to design an optimal dynamic contract between a principal and an agent, who has the authority to control both the principal's revenue and an engineered system. The key characteristic of our problem setting is…

Implementing smart contracts to automate the performance of high-value over-the-counter (OTC) financial derivatives is a formidable challenge. Due to the regulatory framework and the scale of financial risk if a contract were to go wrong,…

Automated synthesis of correct-by-construction controllers for autonomous systems is crucial for their deployment in safety-critical scenarios. Such autonomous systems are naturally modeled as stochastic dynamical models. The general…

Stability guarantees are crucial when ensuring a fully autonomous robot does not take undesirable or potentially harmful actions. Unfortunately, global stability guarantees are hard to provide in dynamical systems learned from data,…

Discrete abstractions have become a standard approach to assist control synthesis under complex specifications. Most techniques for the construction of a discrete abstraction for a continuous-time system require time-space discretization of…

This work studies the design of safe control policies for large-scale non-linear systems operating in uncertain environments. In such a case, the robust control framework is a principled approach to safety that aims to maximize the…

Session contracts is a formalism enabling to investigate client/server interaction protocols and to interpret session types. We extend session contracts in order to represent outputs whose actual sending in an interaction depends on a third…

At the intersection of dynamical systems, control theory, and formal methods lies the construction of symbolic abstractions: these typically represent simpler, finite-state models whose behavior mimics that of an underlying concrete system…

This paper discusses desirable properties of forecasting models in production systems. It then develops a family of models which are designed to satisfy these properties: highly customizable to capture complex patterns; accommodates a large…

This article deals with the interrelation of deontic operators in contracts -- an aspect often neglected when considering only one of the involved parties. On top of an automata-based semantics we formalise the onuses that obligations,…

This paper introduces a framework for analyzing a general class of uncertain nonlinear discrete-time systems with given state-, control-, and disturbance constraints. In particular, we propose a set-theoretic generalization of the concept…

Safety architectures play a crucial role in the safety assurance of automated driving vehicles (ADVs). They can be used as safety envelopes of black-box ADV controllers, and for graceful degradation from one ODD to another. Building on our…

Session types are used to describe and structure interactions between independent processes in distributed systems. Higher-order types are needed in order to properly structure delegation of responsibility between processes. In this paper…

Predictive safety filters enable the integration of potentially unsafe learning-based control approaches and humans into safety-critical systems. In addition to simple constraint satisfaction, many control problems involve additional…

Contracts and contract monitoring are a powerful mechanism for specifying properties and guaranteeing them at run time. However, run time monitoring of contracts imposes a significant overhead. The execution time is impacted by the…

The development of control techniques to maintain vehicle stability under possible loss-of-control scenarios is essential to the safe deployment of autonomous ground vehicles in public scenarios. In this paper, we propose a tube-based…