Related papers: Contract-Based Specification Refinement and Repair…

Effectively specifying and implementing robotic missions poses a set of challenges to software engineering for robotic systems. These challenges stem from the need to formalize and execute a robot's high-level tasks while considering…

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…

Reusable software components need expressive specifications. This paper outlines a rigorous foundation to model-based contracts, a method to equip classes with strong contracts that support accurate design, implementation, and formal…

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…

Unified Modeling Language (UML) is the de facto standard for requirements modeling and system design. UML as a visual language can tremendously help customers, project managers, and developers to specify the requirements of a target system.…

This paper describes our approach to automated program repair. We combine various techniques from the literature to achieve this. Our experiments show that our approach performs better than other techniques on standard benchmarks. However,…

Existing techniques of Design by Contract do not allow software developers to specify complete contracts in many cases. Incomplete contracts leave room for malicious implementations. This article complements Design by Contract with a simple…

We present a compositional approach to early modeling and analysis of complex aerospace systems based on assume-guarantee contracts. Components in a system are abstracted into assume-guarantee specifications. Performing algebraic contract…

As robots are being integrated into our daily lives, it becomes necessary to provide guarantees on the safe and provably correct operation. Such guarantees can be provided using automata theoretic task and mission planning where the…

This paper presents a theory for the refinement of shared-memory concurrent algorithms from specifications. We augment pre and post condition specifications with Jones' rely and guarantee conditions, all of which are encoded as commands…

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…

In the development of safety and mission-critical systems, including autonomous space robotic missions, complex behaviour is captured during the requirements elicitation phase. Requirements are typically expressed using natural language…

Model-driven design of software for safety-critical applications often relies on mathematically grounded techniques such as the B method. Such techniques consist in the successive applications of refinements to derive a concrete…

Logical specifications have been shown to help reinforcement learning algorithms in achieving complex tasks. However, when a task is under-specified, agents might fail to learn useful policies. In this work, we explore the possibility of…

The requirements elicited from stakeholders are typically informal, incomplete, ambiguous, and inconsistent. It is the task of Requirements Engineering to transform them into an eligible (formal, sufficiently complete, unambiguous,…

We study the problem of revising specifications with preferences for automata based control synthesis problems. In this class of revision problems, the user provides a numerical ranking of the desirability of the subgoals in their…

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…

Robustness analyzes the impact of small perturbations in the semantics of a model. This allows to model hardware imprecision and therefore it has been applied to determine implementability of timed automata. In a recent paper, we extend…

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…

Iteratively improving and repairing source code with large language models (LLMs), known as refinement, has emerged as a popular way of generating programs that would be too complex to construct in one shot. Given a bank of test cases,…