Related papers: Behavioural assume-guarantee contracts for linear …
As autonomy becomes prevalent in many applications, ranging from recommendation systems to fully autonomous vehicles, there is an increased need to provide safety guarantees for such systems. The problem is difficult, as these are large,…
We introduce behavioral inequalities as a way to model dynamical systems defined by inequalities among their variables of interest. We claim that such a formulation enables the representation of safety-aware dynamical systems, systems with…
A common technique to verify complex logic specifications for dynamical systems is the construction of symbolic abstractions: simpler, finite-state models whose behaviour mimics the one of the systems of interest. Typically, abstractions…
When developing complex software and systems, contracts provide a means for controlling the complexity by dividing the responsibilities among the components of the system in a hierarchical fashion. In specific application areas, dedicated…
Providing assurances for self-adaptive systems is challenging. A primary underlying problem is uncertainty that may stem from a variety of different sources, ranging from incomplete knowledge to sensor noise and uncertain behavior of humans…
We consider a hidden-action principal-agent model, in which actions require different amounts of effort, and the agent privately knows his ability that determines his cost of effort. We show that linear contracts admit approximation…
We introduce a basic model for contracts. Our model extends event structures with a new relation, which faithfully captures the circular dependencies among contract clauses. We establish whether an agreement exists which respects all the…
Cyber-physical systems (CPS) are assemblies of networked, heterogeneous, hardware, and software components sensing, evaluating, and actuating a physical environment. This heterogeneity induces complexity that makes CPSs challenging to model…
The reference point for developing any artefact is its specification; to develop software formally, a formal specification is required. For sequential programs, pre and post conditions (together with abstract objects) suffice; rely and…
Contract theory studies how a principal can incentivize agents to exert costly, unobservable effort through performance-based payments. While classical economic models provide elegant characterizations of optimal solutions, modern…
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…
Behavioral software contracts are a widely used mechanism for governing the flow of values between components. However, run-time monitoring and enforcement of contracts imposes significant overhead and delays discovery of faulty components…
The Abstraction Refinement Model has been widely adopted since it was firstly proposed many decades ago. This powerful model of software evolution process brings important properties into the system under development, properties such as the…
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…
A key challenge in System of Systems (SoS) engineering is the analysis and maintenance of global properties under SoS evolution, and the integration of new constituent elements. There is a need to model the constituent systems composing a…
Due to the diffusion of IoT, modern software systems are often thought to control and coordinate smart devices in order to manage assets and resources, and to guarantee efficient behaviours. For this class of systems, which interact…
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…
English language requirements are often used to specify the behavior of complex cyber-physical systems. The process of transforming these requirements to a formal specification language is often challenging, especially if the specification…
We propose a methodology that exploits the contract formalism to characterize the continuous-time safety control problem, which is often difficult to address, in terms of a discrete-time one, for which numerous efficient solution scheme…
Rely/guarantee reasoning provides a compositional way of reasoning about concurrency. The ABA problem occurs in many non-blocking concurrent data structures, where a change made by a concurrent process may be undetected by other processes.…