2,750 research outputs found
Applying Formal Methods to Networking: Theory, Techniques and Applications
Despite its great importance, modern network infrastructure is remarkable for
the lack of rigor in its engineering. The Internet which began as a research
experiment was never designed to handle the users and applications it hosts
today. The lack of formalization of the Internet architecture meant limited
abstractions and modularity, especially for the control and management planes,
thus requiring for every new need a new protocol built from scratch. This led
to an unwieldy ossified Internet architecture resistant to any attempts at
formal verification, and an Internet culture where expediency and pragmatism
are favored over formal correctness. Fortunately, recent work in the space of
clean slate Internet design---especially, the software defined networking (SDN)
paradigm---offers the Internet community another chance to develop the right
kind of architecture and abstractions. This has also led to a great resurgence
in interest of applying formal methods to specification, verification, and
synthesis of networking protocols and applications. In this paper, we present a
self-contained tutorial of the formidable amount of work that has been done in
formal methods, and present a survey of its applications to networking.Comment: 30 pages, submitted to IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorial
Premise Selection and External Provers for HOL4
Learning-assisted automated reasoning has recently gained popularity among
the users of Isabelle/HOL, HOL Light, and Mizar. In this paper, we present an
add-on to the HOL4 proof assistant and an adaptation of the HOLyHammer system
that provides machine learning-based premise selection and automated reasoning
also for HOL4. We efficiently record the HOL4 dependencies and extract features
from the theorem statements, which form a basis for premise selection.
HOLyHammer transforms the HOL4 statements in the various TPTP-ATP proof
formats, which are then processed by the ATPs. We discuss the different
evaluation settings: ATPs, accessible lemmas, and premise numbers. We measure
the performance of HOLyHammer on the HOL4 standard library. The results are
combined accordingly and compared with the HOL Light experiments, showing a
comparably high quality of predictions. The system directly benefits HOL4 users
by automatically finding proofs dependencies that can be reconstructed by
Metis
TLA+ Proofs
TLA+ is a specification language based on standard set theory and temporal
logic that has constructs for hierarchical proofs. We describe how to write
TLA+ proofs and check them with TLAPS, the TLA+ Proof System. We use Peterson's
mutual exclusion algorithm as a simple example to describe the features of
TLAPS and show how it and the Toolbox (an IDE for TLA+) help users to manage
large, complex proofs.Comment: A shorter version of this article appeared in the proceedings of the
conference Formal Methods 2012 (FM 2012, Paris, France, Springer LNCS 7436,
pp. 147-154
HOL(y)Hammer: Online ATP Service for HOL Light
HOL(y)Hammer is an online AI/ATP service for formal (computer-understandable)
mathematics encoded in the HOL Light system. The service allows its users to
upload and automatically process an arbitrary formal development (project)
based on HOL Light, and to attack arbitrary conjectures that use the concepts
defined in some of the uploaded projects. For that, the service uses several
automated reasoning systems combined with several premise selection methods
trained on all the project proofs. The projects that are readily available on
the server for such query answering include the recent versions of the
Flyspeck, Multivariate Analysis and Complex Analysis libraries. The service
runs on a 48-CPU server, currently employing in parallel for each task 7 AI/ATP
combinations and 4 decision procedures that contribute to its overall
performance. The system is also available for local installation by interested
users, who can customize it for their own proof development. An Emacs interface
allowing parallel asynchronous queries to the service is also provided. The
overall structure of the service is outlined, problems that arise and their
solutions are discussed, and an initial account of using the system is given
A System for Deduction-based Formal Verification of Workflow-oriented Software Models
The work concerns formal verification of workflow-oriented software models
using deductive approach. The formal correctness of a model's behaviour is
considered. Manually building logical specifications, which are considered as a
set of temporal logic formulas, seems to be the significant obstacle for an
inexperienced user when applying the deductive approach. A system, and its
architecture, for the deduction-based verification of workflow-oriented models
is proposed. The process of inference is based on the semantic tableaux method
which has some advantages when compared to traditional deduction strategies.
The algorithm for an automatic generation of logical specifications is
proposed. The generation procedure is based on the predefined workflow patterns
for BPMN, which is a standard and dominant notation for the modeling of
business processes. The main idea for the approach is to consider patterns,
defined in terms of temporal logic,as a kind of (logical) primitives which
enable the transformation of models to temporal logic formulas constituting a
logical specification. Automation of the generation process is crucial for
bridging the gap between intuitiveness of the deductive reasoning and the
difficulty of its practical application in the case when logical specifications
are built manually. This approach has gone some way towards supporting,
hopefully enhancing our understanding of, the deduction-based formal
verification of workflow-oriented models.Comment: International Journal of Applied Mathematics and Computer Scienc
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