In the procurement of the ACA 12-m antennas, NAOJ has a difficulty of discrepancy between the estimated cost and the appropriated budget. To avoid the risk of being unable to make a contract for the antennas, that can be a huge damage to the future ALMA funding in Japan, NAOJ requests an approval of its conservative approach by modifying the following terms in the technical specifications witho...

In the distributed development of modern IT systems, contracts play a vital role in ensuring interoperability of components and adherence to specifications. The design of embedded systems, however, is made more complex by the heterogeneous nature of components, which are often described using different models and interaction mechanisms. Composing such components is generally not well-defined, m...

In the Spring of 1998, researchers at the Center for Creative Leadership chose to use the Graded Response Model by Samejima as part of a project to assess the behavioral changes that are seen in the participants in the leadership development programs of the Center. It was determined that the existing DOS and Windows software would not function with sufficient reliability within the extant compu...

OBJECTIVES General practitioners (GPs) in the UK may be commissioned to provide long-acting reversible contraception (LARC), which may have a role in reducing rates of abortion and unintended pregnancies. Primary care trusts (PCTs) in England had commissioning arrangements with GPs to provide LARC but little is known about such contractual arrangements. We studied the commissioning arrangements...

We find the optimal time for entering a joint venture by two firms, and the optimal linear contract for sharing the profits. Our dataset shows that in practice, many contracts are based on fifty/fifty profit sharing. In our model, that happens in the following cases: symmetric information and contracts which include fixed cash payments; asymmetric information, fixed cash payments included, and ...

Functional specification and verification often requires specialized mathematicians to do the work. Software development and proving correctness are regarded as separate activities. We want developers to do the specification and verification. One of the promising approaches for letting developers create specifications is the “Design by Contract” methodology [7] as present in the Eiffel language...

ESpec is a suite of tools that facilitates the testing and verification of object-oriented Eiffel programs in an integrated environment. The suite includes unit testing tools (ES-Test) and Fit tables (ES-Fit for customer requirements) that report contract failures. This paper describes ES-Verify (part of ESpec) for automatically verifying a significant subset of Eiffel constructs written with a...

This paper analyses the relationship between the level of a return guarantee in an equity–linked pension scheme and the proportion of an investor’s contribution needed to finance this guarantee. Three types of schemes are considered: investment guarantee, contribution guarantee and participation surplus. The evaluation of each scheme involves pricing an Asian option, for which relatively tight ...

JSContest is a tool that enhances JavaScript with simple, type-like contracts and provides a framework for monitoring and guided random testing of programs against these contracts at the same time. Function contracts in JSContest serve a dual role as specifications of the input/output behavior and as test case generators. Generation of test data for a contract is principally random, but can be ...

One of the main goals of model-driven engineering is the manipulation of models as exclusive software artifacts. Model execution is in particular a means to substitute models for code. We focus in this paper on verifying model executions. We use a contract-based approach to specify an execution semantics for a meta-model. We show that an execution semantics is a seamless extension of a rigorous...