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Probabilistic contracts: a compositional reasoning methodology for the design of systems with stochastic and/or non-deterministic aspects

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Abstract

A contract allows to distinguish hypotheses made on a system (the guarantees) from those made on its environment (the assumptions). In this paper, we focus on models of Assume/Guarantee contracts for (stochastic) systems. We consider contracts capable of capturing reliability and availability properties of such systems. We also show that classical notions of Satisfaction and Refinement can be checked by effective methods thanks to a reduction to classical verification problems. Finally, theorems supporting compositional reasoning and enabling the scalable analysis of complex systems are also studied.

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Correspondence to Axel Legay.

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A preliminary version of this paper appeared in the 10th International Conference on Application of Concurrency to System Design.

This work was supported by the European STREP-COMBEST project no. 215543 and by an “Action de Recherche Collaborative” ARC (TP)I.

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Delahaye, B., Caillaud, B. & Legay, A. Probabilistic contracts: a compositional reasoning methodology for the design of systems with stochastic and/or non-deterministic aspects. Form Methods Syst Des 38, 1–32 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10703-010-0107-8

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