Hypercontracts

Contract theories have been proposed to formally support distributed and decentralized system design while ensuring safe system integration. In this paper we propose hypercontracts, a generic model with a richer structure for its underlying model of components, subsuming simulation preorders. While this new model remains generic, it provides a much more elegant and richer algebra for its key notions of refinement, parallel composition, and quotient, and it allows inclusion of new operations. On top of these foundations, we propose conic hypercontracts, which are still generic but come with a finite description.