Contracts for System Design
type: Dataset
description: Systems design has become a key challenge and differentiating factor over the last decades for system companies. 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 albeit some attempts at this framework such as Platform-based Design have been successfully deployed. 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: contractbased 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 is still missing. This paper 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 paper provides an important link between interfaces and contracts to show similarities and correspondences. Examples of the use of contracts in design are provided as well as in depth analysis of existing literature.
identifier: Report N°: RR-8147
issued: 2026-06-03T10:51:03.119381
language: en
modified: 2026-06-03T10:51:03.119388
contact point: Organization
  fn: CCSD
keyword: acm-d-softwared2-software-engineeringd21-requirementsspecifications
keyword: acm-d-softwared3-programming-languagesd31-formal-definitions-and-theory
keyword: component-based-design
keyword: contract
keyword: infoeu-reposemanticsreport
keyword: infoinfo-escomputer-science-csembedded-systems
keyword: interface
keyword: reports
keyword: system-design
landing page: https://inria.hal.science/hal-00757488

Contracts for System Design
type: Distribution
format: HTML
issued: 2026-06-03T10:51:03.141955
modified: 2026-06-03T10:51:03.092039
access URL: https://inria.hal.science/hal-00757488

test_moissonnage_selune
type: Agent