From Relational Interfaces to Assume-Guarantee Contracts
Pierluigi Nuzzo, Antonio Iannopollo, Stavros Tripakis, Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli

Citation
Pierluigi Nuzzo, Antonio Iannopollo, Stavros Tripakis, Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli. "From Relational Interfaces to Assume-Guarantee Contracts". Technical report, U.C. Berkeley, 2014.

Abstract
Contract-based design is emerging as a unifying compositional paradigm for the specification, design and verification of large-scale complex systems. Yet, different contract frameworks are currently available, without a clear understanding of the relations between them. In this paper, we investigate the relation between interface theories (specifically, relational interfaces) and assume-guarantee (A/G) contracts, revealing some of the subtleties involved. We show that the natural transformation of interfaces to A/G contracts represented by linear temporal logic (LTL) formulas preserves refinement, but does not generally preserve serial composition, and we present an assumption-projection operator to remedy the latter issue. We also discuss the properties of our transformation with respect to conjunction. Finally, we provide illustrative examples that shed light on the effectiveness of both frameworks for requirement formalization, early detection of integration errors, and principled use of abstraction-refinement.

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Citation formats

• HTML

  Pierluigi Nuzzo, Antonio Iannopollo, Stavros Tripakis,
  Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli. <a
  href="http://www.icyphy.org/pubs/42.html"
  ><i>From Relational Interfaces to Assume-Guarantee
  Contracts</i></a>, Technical report,  U.C.
  Berkeley, 2014.

• Plain text

  Pierluigi Nuzzo, Antonio Iannopollo, Stavros Tripakis,
  Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli. "From Relational
  Interfaces to Assume-Guarantee Contracts". Technical
  report,  U.C. Berkeley, 2014.

• BibTeX

  @techreport{NuzzoIannopolloTripakisSangiovanniVincentelli14_FromRelationalInterfacesToAssumeGuaranteeContracts,
      author = {Pierluigi Nuzzo and Antonio Iannopollo and Stavros
                Tripakis and Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli},
      title = {From Relational Interfaces to Assume-Guarantee
                Contracts},
      institution = {U.C. Berkeley},
      year = {2014},
      abstract = {Contract-based design is emerging as a unifying
                compositional paradigm for the specification,
                design and verification of large-scale complex
                systems. Yet, different contract frameworks are
                currently available, without a clear understanding
                of the relations between them. In this paper, we
                investigate the relation between interface
                theories (specifically, relational interfaces) and
                assume-guarantee (A/G) contracts, revealing some
                of the subtleties involved. We show that the
                natural transformation of interfaces to A/G
                contracts represented by linear temporal logic
                (LTL) formulas preserves refinement, but does not
                generally preserve serial composition, and we
                present an assumption-projection operator to
                remedy the latter issue. We also discuss the
                properties of our transformation with respect to
                conjunction. Finally, we provide illustrative
                examples that shed light on the effectiveness of
                both frameworks for requirement formalization,
                early detection of integration errors, and
                principled use of abstraction-refinement.},
      URL = {http://icyphy.org/pubs/42.html}
  }
  

Posted by Pierluigi Nuzzo on 27 Mar 2014.
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