The traditional realm of formal methods is off-line verification of formal properties of hardware and software. We report a different approach that uses formal methods (namely the integration of automata modulo theory with decision procedures) on-the-fly, at the time an application is downloaded on a mobile application such as PDA or a smart phone. The idea behind security-by-contract is that a...

This paper examines questions about contract enforcement in the absence of formal legal institutions, using archival evidence for one particular rural society in pre-emancipation Russia. The evidence presented indicates that enforcement services provided by the local landlord made it possible for Russians from different socioeconomic and legal strata (soslovii) to engage in a wide variety of co...

We give a formal treatment of optimal risk sharing contracts in the face of ambiguity. The ambiguity in a contract arises from clauses that are interpreted by the parties in di¤erent ways. The cost of ambiguity is represented in terms of perceived dispute costs. Taking the potential for dispute into account, we …nd that risk averse agents may forgo potential gains from risk sharing and choose i...

The USL/DBMS NASA/PC R&D Working Paper Series contains a collection of formal and informal reports representing results of PC-based research and development activities being conducted by the Center for Advanced Computer Studies of the University of Southwestern Louisiana pursuant t o the specifications of National Aeronautics and Space Administration Contract Number NASW-3846 and NASA Training ...

The Sulu programming language is a programming language inspired by Resolve; it uses the software component and an embedded design-by-contract formal specification as inputs to a unit testing system that provides a framework for automatically generating, executing and evaluating test cases. This paper describes the tools we constructed for the automated testing system, and a summary of an evalu...

Summary Paper reports on research into the relationship between business activity and vulnerable people in Orissa, India. It considers institutional decision-making processes and their direct impact on these people's lives. Three key situations are considered: privatisation and access to power; contract labour and migration; mining and impact on marginalised groups. Investigation was based upon...

UML provides very little support for modelling evolvable or reusable specifications and designs. To cope with this problem, the UML needs to be extended with support for reuse and evolution of model components. As a first step, this paper enhances the UML metamodel with the “reuse contract” formalism to deal with evolution of collaborating class components. Such a formal semantics for reuse all...

The USL/DBMS NASA/PC R&D Working Paper Series contains a collection of formal and informal reports representing results of PC-based research and development activities being conducted by the Center for Advanced Computer Studies of the University of Southwestern Louisiana pursuant t o the specifications of National Aeronautics and Space Administration Contract Number NASW-3846 and NASA Training ...

The paper presents a method for conformance testing of Internet electronic mail protocols. The method is based on formal specification of the standards following the approach of the contract specification, and designing tests as traversal of a state machine. The paper presents the implementation of the method for the most widely used e-mail protocols SMTP, POP3 and IMAP4 and is illustrated by t...