Related papers: Contracts as specifications for dynamical systems …
Assurance cases are structured arguments that are commonly used to reason about the safety of a product or service. Currently, there is an ongoing push towards using assurance cases for also cybersecurity, especially in safety-critical…
We consider a general framework of optimal mechanism design under adverse selection and ambiguity about the type distribution of agents. We prove the existence of optimal mechanisms under minimal assumptions on the contract space and prove…
This essay advocates the view that any problem that has a meaningful empirical content, can be formulated in constructive, more definitely, finite terms. We consider combinatorial models of dynamical systems and approaches to statistical…
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…
We study compliance relations between behavioural contracts in a syntax independent setting based on Labelled Transition Systems. We introduce a fix-point based family of compliance relations, and show that many compliance relations…
Specifying the intended behaviour of autonomous systems is becoming increasingly important but is fraught with many challenges. This technical report provides an overview of existing work on specifications of autonomous systems and places a…
This paper is a survey of extensions to finite automata theory to model real-time systems as well as systems exhibiting mixed discrete-continuous behavior. Real-time systems maintain a continuous and timely interaction with the environment,…
We propose a Capabilities-based approach for building long-lived, complex systems that have lengthy development cycles. User needs and technology evolve during these extended development periods, and thereby, inhibit a fixed…
Since the discovery of Spectre, a large number of hardware mechanisms for secure speculation has been proposed. Intuitively, more defensive mechanisms are less efficient but can securely execute a larger class of programs, while more…
Timed automata are a common formalism for the verification of concurrent systems subject to timing constraints. They extend finite-state automata with clocks, that constrain the system behavior in locations, and to take transitions. While…
Effectively specifying and implementing robotic missions poses a set of challenges to software engineering for robotic systems. These challenges stem from the need to formalize and execute a robot's high-level tasks while considering…
Approaches to keeping a dynamical system within state constraints typically rely on a model-based safety condition to limit the control signals. In the face of significant modeling uncertainty, the system can suffer from important…
We propose here to look at how abstract a model of a usable system can be, but still say something useful and interesting, so this paper is an exercise in abstraction and formalisation, with usability-of-design as an example target use. We…
This work presents a theoretical framework for the safety-critical control of time delay systems. The theory of control barrier functions, that provides formal safety guarantees for delay-free systems, is extended to systems with state…
In this work we aim to bridge the divide between autonomous vehicles and causal reasoning. Autonomous vehicles have come to increasingly interact with human drivers, and in many cases may pose risks to the physical or mental well-being of…
We describe a method and tool called \textit{ContractCheck} that allows for the consistency analysis of legal contracts, in particular Sales Purchase Agreements (SPAs). The analysis relies on an encoding of the premises for the execution of…
The notion of contract aware components has been published roughly ten years ago and is now becoming mainstream in several fields where the usage of software components is seen as critical. The goal of this paper is to survey domains such…
Path signatures have been proposed as a powerful representation of paths that efficiently captures the path's analytic and geometric characteristics, having useful algebraic properties including fast concatenation of paths through tensor…
Current models for software components have made component-based software engineering practical. However, these models are limited in the sense that their support for the characterization/specification of design components primarily deals…
We consider the setting of component-based design for real-time systems with critical timing constraints. Based on our earlier work, we propose a compositional specification theory for timed automata with I/O distinction, which supports…