Related papers: Pacti: Scaling Assume-Guarantee Reasoning for Syst…
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…
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…
Quantitative requirements play an important role in the context of multi-agent systems, where there is often a trade-off between the tasks of individual agents and the constraints that the agents must jointly adhere to. We study multi-agent…
In this position paper, we consider some foundational topics regarding smart contracts (such as terminology, automation, enforceability, and semantics) and define a smart contract as an automatable and enforceable agreement. We explore a…
Agentic AI systems - systems that can pursue goals through multi-step planning and tool-mediated action with limited direct supervision - are moving from experimental prototypes to enterprise deployments. This transition introduces tensions…
Design by Contract enables seamless software development by unifying software requirements with their implementations. In its pure form, however, Design by Contract leaves some problems with contracts' expressiveness, verifiability, and…
Contracts are a well-established approach for describing and analyzing behavioral aspects of web service compositions. The theory of contracts comes equipped with a notion of compatibility between clients and servers that ensures that every…
Identifying the cause of a system-level failure in a cyber-physical system (CPS) can be like tracing a needle in a haystack. This paper approaches the problem by assuming that the CPS has been designed compositionally and that each…
Contract scheduling is a widely studied framework for designing real-time systems with interruptible capabilities. Previous work has showed that a prediction on the interruption time can help improve the performance of contract-based…
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…
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…
This paper motivates the views that for complex systems, risk should be controlled by enforcing constraints in a modular way at different system levels, that the constraints can be expressed as assurance contracts and that acceptable risk…
A computable contract is a contract that a computer can read, understand and execute. The financial services industry makes extensive use of contracts, for example, mortgage agreements, derivatives contracts, arbitration agreements, etc.…
Performance improvement in supply chains, taking into account customer demand in the tactical planning process is essential. It is more and more difficult for the customers to ensure a certain level of demand over a medium term horizon as…
Many challenges in today's society can be tackled by distributed open systems. This is particularly true for domains that are commonly perceived under the umbrella of smart cities, such as intelligent transportation, smart energy grids, or…
Smart Contract Templates support legally-enforceable smart contracts, using operational parameters to connect legal agreements to standardised code. In this paper, we explore the design landscape of potential formats for storage and…
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…
Agentic AI, often powered by large language models (LLMs), is becoming increasingly popular and adopted to support autonomous reasoning, decision-making, and task execution across various domains. While agentic AI holds great promise, its…
We investigate how contracts can be used to regulate the interaction between processes. To do that, we study a variant of the concurrent constraints calculus presented in [1], featuring primitives for multi-party synchronization via…
The industrial market continuously needs reliable solutions to secure autonomous systems. Especially as these systems become more complex and interconnected, reliable security solutions are becoming increasingly important. One promising…