Team, Visitors, External Collaborators
Overall Objectives
Research Program
Highlights of the Year
New Software and Platforms
New Results
Bilateral Contracts and Grants with Industry
Partnerships and Cooperations
Dissemination
Bibliography
XML PDF e-pub
PDF e-Pub


Section: New Results

Contract-based Reasoning for Cyper-Physical Systems Design

Contracts for Cyper-Physical Systems Design

Participants : Albert Benveniste, Benoît Caillaud.

Contract-based reasoningn has been proposed as an “orthogonal” approach that complements methodologies proposed so far to cope with the complexity of cyber-physical systems design. Contract-based reasoning provides a rigorous framework for the verification, analysis, abstraction/refinement, and even synthesis of cyber-physical systems. A number of results have been obtained in this domain but a unified treatment of the topic that can help put contract-based design in perspective was missing. In [6], Albert Benveniste, Benoît Caillaud and co-authors provide a unified theory where contracts are precisely defined and characterized so that they can be used in design methodologies with no ambiguity. This monograph gathers research results of the former S4 inria team. It identifies the essence of complex system design using contracts through a mathematical meta-theory, where all the properties of the methodology are derived from an abstract and generic notion of contract. We show that the meta-theory provides deep and enlightening links with existing contract and interface theories, as well as guidelines for designing new theories. Our study encompasses contracts for both software and systems, with emphasis on the latter. We illustrate the use of contracts with two examples: requirement engineering for a parking garage management, and the development of contracts for timing and scheduling in the context of the Autosar methodology in use in the automotive sector.

Cyber-Physical Systems Design: from Natural Language Requirements

In his current PhD work, co-supervised by Benoît Caillaud and Annie Forêt (SemLIS, IRISA, Rennes, France), Aurélien Lamercerie explores the construction of formal representations of natural language texts. The mapping from a natural language to a logical representation is realized with a grammatical formalism, linking the syntactic analysis of the text to a semantic representation. In  [44], Aurélien Lamercerie targets behavioral specifications of cyber-physical systems, ie any type of system in which software components interact closely with a physical environment. The objective is the simulation and formal verification, by automatic or assisted methods, of system level requirements expressed in a controled fragment of a natural language.