Related papers: Structural Contracts -- Contracts for Type Constru…

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…

Verifying specifications for large-scale modern engineering systems can be a time-consuming task, as most formal verification methods are limited to systems of modest size. Recently, contract-based design and verification has been proposed…

Writing parallel codes is difficult and exhibits a fundamental trade-off between abstraction and performance. The high level language abstractions designed to simplify the complexities of parallelism make certain assumptions that impacts…

Experience with lightweight formal methods suggests that programmers are willing to write specification if it brings tangible benefits to their usual development activities. This paper considers stronger specifications and studies whether…

We present assume-guarantee contracts for continuous-time linear dynamical systems with inputs and outputs. These contracts are used to express specifications on the dynamic behaviour of a system. Contrary to existing approaches, we use…

Contract-based design is a promising methodology for taming the complexity of developing sophisticated systems. A formal contract distinguishes between assumptions, which are constraints that the designer of a component puts on the…

The use of function contracts to specify the behavior of functions often remains limited to the scope of a single function call. Relational properties link several function calls together within a single specification. They can express more…

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…

The purpose of this present paper is to investigate the geometric structure of regular overdetermined systems of second order with two independent and one dependent variables from the point of view of rank 2 prolongations. Utilizing this…

Contract scheduling is a general technique that allows to design a system with interruptible capabilities, given an algorithm that is not necessarily interruptible. Previous work on this topic has largely assumed that the interruption is a…

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…

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…

In the setting of the pi-calculus with binary sessions, we aim at relaxing the notion of duality of session types by the concept of retractable compliance developed in contract theory. This leads to extending session types with a new type…

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,…

We prove that functionality of compositions of top-down tree transducers is decidable by reducing the problem to the functionality of one top-down tree transducer with look-ahead.

Motivated by the growing requirements on the operation of complex engineering systems, we present contracts as specifications for continuous-time linear dynamical systems with inputs and outputs. A contract is defined as a pair of…

The disastrous vulnerabilities in smart contracts sharply remind us of our ignorance: we do not know how to write code that is secure in composition with malicious code. Information flow control has long been proposed as a way to achieve…

This paper presents a critical discussion of popular approaches to ensure the Liskov substitution principle in class hierarchies (e.g. Design by Contract(TM), specification inheritance). It will be shown that they have some deficiencies…

Web Service Composition deals with the (re)use of Web Services to provide complex functionality, inexistent in any single service. Over the state-of-the-art, we introduce a new type of modeling, based on ontologies and relations between…

Service composition has become commonplace nowadays, in large part due to the increased complexity of software and supporting networks. Composition can be of many types, for instance sequential, prioritising, non-deterministic. However, a…