Contract-Based Agentic Systems Engineering: Delegation as Quotient for Assured System Design

Abstract

A component an agent builds from a prompt can satisfy it and still break the system it joins, because the prompt omits what its neighbours assume of it. The artifact to hand over is computed, not written. A SysML v2 requirement with assumed and required constraints is an assume/guarantee contract, so when a system requirement is decomposed over fixed neighbours, the open component's requirement is the contract quotient, the weakest sound one, and again a SysML v2 requirement. Its required constraints carry the neighbours' assumptions, which a requirement for the mission alone drops and unit tests with mocked neighbours cannot reach. Signal Temporal Logic is closed under the quotient. We build the requirements, with derivation, allocation, satisfaction and verification, as a SysML~v2 model and compute the quotient from it. A case study delegates the local controller of a simulated warehouse robot, whose route crosses a worker's path and ends at a dock, to one language model under the quotient requirement, a mission-only requirement and a natural-language task, and scores the deliveries on live episodes against the system requirement from ground truth.