Related papers: Contracts as specifications for dynamical systems …
Existing procedures for model validation have been deemed inadequate for many engineering systems. The reason of this inadequacy is due to the high degree of complexity of the mechanisms that govern these systems. It is proposed in this…
We propose and study a system whose dynamics are governed by predictions of its future states. General formalism and concrete examples are presented. We find that the dynamical characteristics depend on both how to shape predictions as well…
Many challenges in today's society can be tackled by distributed open systems. This is particularly true for domains that are commonly perceived under the umbrella of smart cities, such as intelligent transportation, smart energy grids, or…
To test automated driving systems, we present a case study for finding critical scenarios in driving environments guided by formal specifications. To that aim, we devise a framework for critical scenario identification, which we base on…
We propose a new principal-agent framework where a principal communicates a roadmap -- a set of plausible outcome models and a prior belief over them -- to guide an agent who is learning the value of innovation. The agent trusts the prior…
We consider a hypergraph (I,C), with possible multiple (hyper)edges and loops, in which the vertices $i\in I$ are interpreted as agents, and the edges $c\in C$ as contracts that can be concluded between agents. The preferences of each agent…
Motivated by the recent interest in formal methods-based control for dynamic robots, we discuss the applicability of prescribed performance control to nonlinear systems subject to signal temporal logic specifications. Prescribed performance…
Contracts specifying a procedure's behavior in terms of pre- and postconditions are essential for scalable software verification, but cannot express any constraints on the events occurring during execution of the procedure. This…
Modal automata are a classic formal model for component-based systems that comes equipped with a rich specification theory supporting abstraction, refinement and compositional reasoning. In recent years, quantitative variants of modal…
We analyze conditional optimization problems arising in discrete time Principal-Agent problems of delegated portfolio optimization with linear contracts. Applying tools from Conditional Analysis we show that some results known in the…
The tremendous excitement around the deployment of autonomous vehicles (AVs) comes from their purported promise. In addition to decreasing accidents, AVs are projected to usher in a new era of equity in human autonomy by providing…
Using dedicated software to represent or enact legislation or regulation has the advantage of solving the inherent ambiguity of legal texts and enabling the automation of compliance with legal norms. On the other hand, the so-called…
We present a complete theory of higher-order autonomous contact mechanics, which allows us to describe higher-order dynamical systems with dissipation. The essential tools for the theory are the extended higher-order tangent bundles, ${\rm…
This review presents and evaluates various formalisms for the purpose of modelling the semantics of financial derivatives contracts. The formalism proposed by Lee is selected as the best candidate among those initially reviewed. Further…
This paper studies an optimal control problem for a string of vehicles with safety requirements and finite-time specifications on the approach time to a target region. Our problem formulation is motivated by scenarios involving autonomous…
This paper presents a new theory, known as robust dynamic pro- gramming, for a class of continuous-time dynamical systems. Different from traditional dynamic programming (DP) methods, this new theory serves as a fundamental tool to analyze…
A distributed cooperative control law for persistent coverage tasks is proposed, capable of coordinating a team of heterogeneous agents in a structured environment. Team heterogeneity is considered both at vehicles' dynamics and at coverage…
This article develops variational integrators for a class of underactuated mechanical systems using the theory of discrete mechanics. Further, a discrete optimal control problem is formulated for the considered class of systems and…
The need for control strategies that can address dynamic system uncertainty is becoming increasingly important. In this work, we propose a Model Predictive Control by quantifying the risk of failure in our system model. The proposed control…
The flow of contracting systems contracts 1-dimensional parallelotopes, i.e., line segments, at an exponential rate. One reason for the usefulness of contracting systems is that many interconnections of contracting sub-systems yield an…