Related papers: Behavioural assume-guarantee contracts for linear …
Designing robots capable of generating interpretable behavior is a prerequisite for achieving effective human-robot collaboration. This means that the robots need to be capable of generating behavior that aligns with human expectations and,…
This paper investigates contraction properties of switched dynamical systems for the case that all modes are non-contracting, thereby extending existing results that require at least one mode to be contracting. Leveraging the property that…
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…
Self-adaptive systems are capable of adjusting their behavior to cope with the changes in environment and itself. These changes may cause runtime uncertainty, which refers to the system state of failing to achieve appropriate…
Ensuring reliable performance in situations outside the Operational Design Domain (ODD) remains a primary challenge in devising resilient autonomous systems. We explore this challenge by introducing an approach for adapting probabilistic…
We show that the operations of composition and merging of contracts are part of the tensor product structure of the algebra of contracts.
In systems engineering, accurately decomposing requirements is crucial for creating well-defined and manageable system components, particularly in safety-critical domains. Despite the critical need, rigorous, top-down methodologies for…
Complex decision-making is a prominent aspect of Requirements Engineering. This work presents the Bayesian network Requisites that predicts whether the requirements specification documents have to be revised. We show how to validate…
We establish a relation between two models of contracts: binary session types, and a model based on event structures and game-theoretic notions. In particular, we show that compliance in session types corresponds to the existence of certain…
The activity framework is a promising model-based design approach for Flexible Manufacturing Systems (FMS). It is used in industry for specification and analysis of FMS. It provides an intuitive specification language with a hierarchical…
We consider the robust contract design problem when the principal only has limited information about the actions the agent can take. The principal evaluates a contract according to its worst-case performance caused by the uncertain action…
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…
This position paper argues that behavioural assurance, even when carefully designed, is being asked to carry safety claims it cannot verify. AI governance frameworks enacted between 2019 and early 2026 require reviewable evidence of…
The application considered is mixed-criticality scheduling. The core formal approaches used are Rely-Guarantee conditions and the Timeband framework; these are applied to give a layered description of job scheduling which includes…
We address the problem of modeling, refining, and repairing formal specifications for robotic missions using assume-guarantee contracts. We show how to model mission specifications at various levels of abstraction and implement them using a…
We present a new approach to automated reasoning about higher-order programs by endowing symbolic execution with a notion of higher-order, symbolic values. Our approach is sound and relatively complete with respect to a first-order solver…
The Contract Net Protocol (1980) introduced coordination through contracts in multi-agent systems. Modern agent protocols standardize connectivity and interoperability; yet, none provide formal, resource governance-normative mechanisms to…
We study a two-period moral hazard problem; there are two agents, with action sets that are unknown to the principal. The principal contracts with each agent sequentially, and seeks to maximize the worst-case discounted sum of payoffs,…
We describe the notion of stability of coherent systems as a framework to deal with redundancy. We define stable coherent systems and show how this notion can help the design of reliable systems. We demonstrate that the reliability of…
Long-term autonomy requires autonomous systems to adapt as their capabilities no longer perform as expected. To achieve this, a system must first be capable of detecting such changes. In this position paper, we describe a system…