Related papers: Behavioural contracts for linear dynamical systems…
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…
Behavior trees represent a hierarchical and modular way of combining several low-level control policies into a high-level task-switching policy. Hybrid dynamical systems can also be seen in terms of task switching between different…
We describe an automated technique for assume-guarantee style checking of strong simulation between a system and a specification, both expressed as non-deterministic Labeled Probabilistic Transition Systems (LPTSes). We first characterize…
We consider the decentralized control of a discrete-time time-varying linear system subject to additive disturbances and polyhedral constraints on the state and input trajectories. The underlying system is composed of a finite collection of…
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…
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…
We present an approach for modelling the structure and coarse content of legal documents with a view to providing automated support for the drafting of contracts and contract database retrieval. The approach is designed to be applicable…
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…
A variety of physical, social and biological systems generate complex fluctuations with correlations across multiple time scales. In physiologic systems, these long-range correlations are altered with disease and aging. Such correlated…
This work proposes action networks as a semantically well-founded framework for reasoning about actions and change under uncertainty. Action networks add two primitives to probabilistic causal networks: controllable variables and persistent…
This paper discusses how model checking, a technique used for the verification of behavioural requirements of dynamic systems, can be usefully deployed for the verification of contracts. A process view of agreements between parties is…
System identification of complex and nonlinear systems is a central problem for model predictive control and model-based reinforcement learning. Despite their complexity, such systems can often be approximated well by a set of linear…
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…
The measurement of human behavior remains a central challenge across the behavioral sciences. Traditional approaches typically rely on passive observation of responses collected under static or weakly controlled conditions, limiting the…
Persistence and permanence are properties of dynamical systems that describe the long-term behavior of the solutions, and in particular specify whether positive solutions approach the boundary of the positive orthant. Mass-action systems…
Simulations of specifications are introduced as a unification and generalization of refinement mappings, history variables, forward simulations, prophecy variables, and backward simulations. A specification implements another specification…
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…
Many natural systems, such as neurons firing in the brain or basketball teams traversing a court, give rise to time series data with complex, nonlinear dynamics. We can gain insight into these systems by decomposing the data into segments…
Analyzing signals arising from dynamical systems typically requires many modeling assumptions and parameter estimation. In high dimensions, this modeling is particularly difficult due to the "curse of dimensionality". In this paper, we…
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…