TECoSA Director Martin Törngren has been awarded the prestigious ICCPS Test-of-Time Award for the paper “Cyber-physical system design contracts”, co-authored with Patricia Derler, Edward A. Lee, and Stavros Tripakis. The award was officially announced during CPS-IoT Week in Saint Malo, France, on May 11–14, 2026.
The award citation highlights the paper’s “foundational contributions to cyber-physical systems design methodology through pioneering inter-domain design contracts.” The ICCPS Test-of-Time Award honors papers that, over at least a decade, have significantly influenced both research and practice within cyber-physical systems.
Originally presented at the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Cyber-Physical Systems in 2013, the paper introduced design contracts as a systematic way to manage the complexity of cyber-physical systems by enabling clear interactions across engineering domains. The ideas built on Martin’s earlier work and were further developed during his 2011–2012 sabbatical at UC Berkeley and further developed once Martin returned back to KTH.
“Scientific influence often unfolds across years or decades. Seeing this work continue to shape the field more than a decade later is both humbling and gratifying,” says Martin Törngren.