Interface theories, notably interface automata, serve as expressive frameworks for component-based design, specifying component behavior and interaction in concurrent systems. Traditional interface formalisms specify assumptions that a component’s environment must satisfy and the guarantees that each component provides. This qualitative view of component interaction based on imposing strict assumptions and Boolean guarantees may, however, not be expressive enough to capture the system’s allowed or desired behaviors under different environments. In this paper, we introduce reward interfaces to support component-based design while accommodating multi-valued correctness requirements and adaptive best-effort satisfaction of component’s guarantees. Building upon interface automata, our framework enables modeling a rich class of quantitative component specifications. We propose formal notions of implementation, refinement and compatibility for reward interfaces. We study a class of reward interfaces with automata-based representations, for which we provide algorithms for checking compatibility and refinement, and existence of best-effort implementations. Our framework offers a comprehensive approach to reward interface specification and design.

Quantitative requirements play an important role in the context of multi-agent systems, where there is often a trade-off between the tasks of individual agents and the constraints that the agents must jointly adhere to. We study multi-agent systems whose requirements are formally specified in the quantitative temporal logic LTL[F] as a combination of local task specifications for the individual agents and a shared safety constraint, The intricate dependencies between the individual agents entailed by their local and shared objectives make the design of multi-agent systems error-prone, and their verification time-consuming. In this paper we address this problem by proposing a novel notion of quantitative assume-guarantee contracts, that enables the compositional design and verification of multi-agent systems with quantitative temporal specifications. The crux of these contracts lies in their ability to capture the coordination between the individual agents to achieve an optimal value of the overall specification under any possible behavior of the external environment. We show that the proposed framework improves the scalability and modularity of formal verification of multi-agent systems against quantitative temporal specifications.