Configuration-aware contracts

Abstract

Assumption/guarantee contracts represent the basis for independent development of reusable components and their safety assurance within contract-based design. In the context of safety-critical systems, their use for reuse of safety assurance efforts has encountered some challenges: the need for evidence supporting the confidence in the contracts; and the challenge of context, where contracts need to impose different requirements on different systems. In this paper we propose the notion of configuration-aware contracts to address the challenge contract-based design faces with multiple contexts. Since reusable components are often developed with a set of configuration parameters that need to be configured in each context, we extend the notion of contract to distinguish between the configuration parameters and the other variables. Moreover, we define a multi-context reusable component based on the configuration-aware contracts. Finally, we demonstrate the usefulness of the multi-context components on a motivating case.