Probabilistic Contracts : A Compositional Reasoning Methodology for the Design of Systems with Stochastic and/or non-Deterministic Aspects

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 classi- cal 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.