Introduction
Audience: Undergraduates and beginning graduate students who have just been introduced to System of Systems (SoS) thinking. No CADL experience required.
Duration: about 95 minutes — a 5-minute setup plus six 15-minute steps.
What you take home: A working CADL specification you wrote yourself, a generated Unity C# implementation, and a running 5-robot delivery simulation in which missed deadlines and battery-rule violations are detected and the affected contract instances are moved to
Violated.First time here? Read from Chapter 1 in order. The textbook explains everything it uses, so you do not need to read other pages first.
How this textbook is organised
This textbook is Course A of the CADL hands-on materials. It walks once through the whole toolchain on a robot-delivery system and adds, at the end of Chapters 4–9, the exercises of a five-session class on the same system.
| Part | Chapters |
|---|---|
| I. Foundations | 1. What is an SoS? · 2. The toolchain and setup · 3. Essentials of CADL |
| II. Practice | 4. Writing the structure · 5. Writing the norms · 6. Visualising the lifecycle · 7. Generating code and running the reference runtime · 8. Running the simulation in Unity · 9. Improving the specification |
| III. Going further | 10. Generating contracts with an LLM · 11. Where to go next |
| Appendices | A. Glossary · B. Notation quick reference · C. Using this textbook in a class · D. References |
There are two ways to use it:
- Self-study (about 95 minutes): follow Chapters 1–8 and skip the exercises at the end of each chapter.
- A class (five sessions, or three): Chapters 4–9 make up the five sessions; the exercises at the end of each chapter are done in class and as homework. See Appendix C.