118,271 research outputs found
Performance-Based Specifications: Exploring When They Work and Why
There is extensive research and attention on innovation and sustainable public procurement (SPP) in the European Union at present, with the 2014 revision of the Procurement Directives, the Innovation Union strategy and other European Union policy initiatives. This report seeks to contribute to this discussion through the investigation of the use of performance based specifications (PBSs) in public procurement in the European Union and the United States. The report outlines the benefits and limitations of the use of PBSs, even in the most "progressive" public procurement environments, such as the Netherlands, particularly around their ability to support sustainable development goals and deliver environmental benefits for a procuring authority, such as energy and resource efficiency. Additionally, this report aims to identify the sectors in which the enabling conditions for the successful use of PBSs in public procurement are in place and to understand what policies and regulations are needed to promote the use of PBSs in public tenders and public procurement framework agreements
Monitoring and Assessing the Use of External Quality Review Organizations to Improve Services for Young Children: A Toolkit for State Medicaid Agencies
Assesses the extent to which states use external quality review organizations in studying the quality of preventive and developmental services for young children enrolled in Medicaid, and provides guidance on determining their scope of work
Specifying Reusable Components
Reusable software components need expressive specifications. This paper
outlines a rigorous foundation to model-based contracts, a method to equip
classes with strong contracts that support accurate design, implementation, and
formal verification of reusable components. Model-based contracts
conservatively extend the classic Design by Contract with a notion of model,
which underpins the precise definitions of such concepts as abstract
equivalence and specification completeness. Experiments applying model-based
contracts to libraries of data structures suggest that the method enables
accurate specification of practical software
Towards Realizability Checking of Contracts using Theories
Virtual integration techniques focus on building architectural models of
systems that can be analyzed early in the design cycle to try to lower cost,
reduce risk, and improve quality of complex embedded systems. Given appropriate
architectural descriptions and compositional reasoning rules, these techniques
can be used to prove important safety properties about the architecture prior
to system construction. Such proofs build from "leaf-level" assume/guarantee
component contracts through architectural layers towards top-level safety
properties. The proofs are built upon the premise that each leaf-level
component contract is realizable; i.e., it is possible to construct a component
such that for any input allowed by the contract assumptions, there is some
output value that the component can produce that satisfies the contract
guarantees. Without engineering support it is all too easy to write leaf-level
components that can't be realized. Realizability checking for propositional
contracts has been well-studied for many years, both for component synthesis
and checking correctness of temporal logic requirements. However, checking
realizability for contracts involving infinite theories is still an open
problem. In this paper, we describe a new approach for checking realizability
of contracts involving theories and demonstrate its usefulness on several
examples.Comment: 15 pages, to appear in NASA Formal Methods (NFM) 201
Multilevel Contracts for Trusted Components
This article contributes to the design and the verification of trusted
components and services. The contracts are declined at several levels to cover
then different facets, such as component consistency, compatibility or
correctness. The article introduces multilevel contracts and a
design+verification process for handling and analysing these contracts in
component models. The approach is implemented with the COSTO platform that
supports the Kmelia component model. A case study illustrates the overall
approach.Comment: In Proceedings WCSI 2010, arXiv:1010.233
Contracts as specifications for dynamical systems in driving variable form
This paper introduces assume/guarantee contracts on continuous-time control
systems, hereby extending contract theories for discrete systems to certain new
model classes and specifications. Contracts are regarded as formal
characterizations of control specifications, providing an alternative to
specifications in terms of dissipativity properties or set-invariance. The
framework has the potential to capture a richer class of specifications more
suitable for complex engineering systems. The proposed contracts are supported
by results that enable the verification of contract implementation and the
comparison of contracts. These results are illustrated by an example of a
vehicle following system.Comment: 8 pages, 2 figures; minor changes in the final version, as accepted
for publication in the Proceedings of the 2019 European Control Conference,
Naples, Ital
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