Contracts for System Design
Abstract:
Presentation Slides
Aircrafts, trains, cars, plants, distributed telecommunication military or health care systems, and more, involve systems design as a critical step. Complexity has caused system design times and costs to go severely over budget so as to threaten the health of entire industrial sectors. Heuristic methods and standard practices do not seem to scale with complexity so that novel design methods and tools based on a strong theoretical foundation are sorely needed. Model-based design as well as other methodologies such as layered and compositional design have been used recently but a unified intellectual framework with a complete design flow supported by formal tools is still lacking. Recently an “orthogonal” approach has been proposed that can be applied to all methodologies proposed thus far to provide a rigorous scaffolding for verification, analysis and abstraction/refinement: contract-based design. Several results have been obtained in this domain but a unified treatment of the topic that can help in putting contract-based design in perspective was missing. This talk intends to provide such treatment where contracts are precisely defined and characterized so that they can be used in design methodologies such as the ones mentioned above with no ambiguity. In addition, the talk provides an important link between interface and contract theories to show similarities and correspondences. Examples of the use of contracts in requirement engineering are provided.
This is team work by the following group of authors: A. Benveniste, B. Caillaud, D. Nickovic, R. Passerone, J-B. Raclet, P. Reinkemeier, A. Sangiovanni-Vincentelli, W. Damm, T. Henzinger, and K.G. Larsen.
Biography:
In 1980 Albert Benveniste was co-winner of the IEEE Trans. on Automatic Control Best Transaction Paper Award for his paper on blind deconvolution in data communications. In 1990 he received the CNRS silver medal, in 1991 he has been elected IEEE fellow, and in 2013 he has been elected IFAC Fellow. In 2008 he was winner of the Grand Prix France Telecom of the French Academy of Sciences. From 1986 to 1990 he was vice-chairman of the IFAC committee on Theory and was chairman of this committee for 1991-1993. He has been or is Associate Editor (at Large) for IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, Associate Editor for Int. J. of Adaptive Control and Signal Processing, and Int. J. of Discrete Event Dynamical Systems. He is currently member of the Editorial Board of the Proceedings of the IEEE. From 1994 to 1996 he has been Directeur Scientifique (Senior Chief Scientist) at Inria. From 1997 to 2001, he has been chairman of the "software chapter" of the RNRT funding programme of the French ministries for research and telecommunications, for telecommunications (Reseau National de la Recherche en Telecommunications). Since 1997, he has been responsible for INRIA of the joint Alcatel-INRIA research programme and is now chief scientist of the joint Bell Labs-INRIA research lab. He is member of the scientific board of INRIA, in charge of embedded systems area. He has been member of the advisory board of T-Source, a venture capitalist specialist in seed capital for the telecommunications sector. He is a member of the scientific advisory boards of Safran Group and Orange. From June 2011 to April 2014, he was co-heading the Center of Excellence (Labex) CominLabs in the area of telecommunications and Information systems. He has been elected to the Académie des Technologies in december 2011.