1,919 research outputs found
Optimization Modulo Theories with Linear Rational Costs
In the contexts of automated reasoning (AR) and formal verification (FV),
important decision problems are effectively encoded into Satisfiability Modulo
Theories (SMT). In the last decade efficient SMT solvers have been developed
for several theories of practical interest (e.g., linear arithmetic, arrays,
bit-vectors). Surprisingly, little work has been done to extend SMT to deal
with optimization problems; in particular, we are not aware of any previous
work on SMT solvers able to produce solutions which minimize cost functions
over arithmetical variables. This is unfortunate, since some problems of
interest require this functionality.
In the work described in this paper we start filling this gap. We present and
discuss two general procedures for leveraging SMT to handle the minimization of
linear rational cost functions, combining SMT with standard minimization
techniques. We have implemented the procedures within the MathSAT SMT solver.
Due to the absence of competitors in the AR, FV and SMT domains, we have
experimentally evaluated our implementation against state-of-the-art tools for
the domain of linear generalized disjunctive programming (LGDP), which is
closest in spirit to our domain, on sets of problems which have been previously
proposed as benchmarks for the latter tools. The results show that our tool is
very competitive with, and often outperforms, these tools on these problems,
clearly demonstrating the potential of the approach.Comment: Submitted on january 2014 to ACM Transactions on Computational Logic,
currently under revision. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1202.140
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
Incremental QBF Solving
We consider the problem of incrementally solving a sequence of quantified
Boolean formulae (QBF). Incremental solving aims at using information learned
from one formula in the process of solving the next formulae in the sequence.
Based on a general overview of the problem and related challenges, we present
an approach to incremental QBF solving which is application-independent and
hence applicable to QBF encodings of arbitrary problems. We implemented this
approach in our incremental search-based QBF solver DepQBF and report on
implementation details. Experimental results illustrate the potential benefits
of incremental solving in QBF-based workflows.Comment: revision (camera-ready, to appear in the proceedings of CP 2014,
LNCS, Springer
Linear Encodings of Bounded LTL Model Checking
We consider the problem of bounded model checking (BMC) for linear temporal
logic (LTL). We present several efficient encodings that have size linear in
the bound. Furthermore, we show how the encodings can be extended to LTL with
past operators (PLTL). The generalised encoding is still of linear size, but
cannot detect minimal length counterexamples. By using the virtual unrolling
technique minimal length counterexamples can be captured, however, the size of
the encoding is quadratic in the specification. We also extend virtual
unrolling to Buchi automata, enabling them to accept minimal length
counterexamples.
Our BMC encodings can be made incremental in order to benefit from
incremental SAT technology. With fairly small modifications the incremental
encoding can be further enhanced with a termination check, allowing us to prove
properties with BMC. Experiments clearly show that our new encodings improve
performance of BMC considerably, particularly in the case of the incremental
encoding, and that they are very competitive for finding bugs. An analysis of
the liveness-to-safety transformation reveals many similarities to the BMC
encodings in this paper. Using the liveness-to-safety translation with
BDD-based invariant checking results in an efficient method to find shortest
counterexamples that complements the BMC-based approach.Comment: Final version for Logical Methods in Computer Science CAV 2005
special issu
Model Predictive Control for Signal Temporal Logic Specification
We present a mathematical programming-based method for model predictive
control of cyber-physical systems subject to signal temporal logic (STL)
specifications. We describe the use of STL to specify a wide range of
properties of these systems, including safety, response and bounded liveness.
For synthesis, we encode STL specifications as mixed integer-linear constraints
on the system variables in the optimization problem at each step of a receding
horizon control framework. We prove correctness of our algorithms, and present
experimental results for controller synthesis for building energy and climate
control
A tool for model-checking Markov chains
Markov chains are widely used in the context of the performance and reliability modeling of various systems. Model checking of such chains with respect to a given (branching) temporal logic formula has been proposed for both discrete [34, 10] and continuous time settings [7, 12]. In this paper, we describe a prototype model checker for discrete and continuous-time Markov chains, the Erlangen-Twente Markov Chain Checker EÎMC2, where properties are expressed in appropriate extensions of CTL. We illustrate the general benefits of this approach and discuss the structure of the tool. Furthermore, we report on successful applications of the tool to some examples, highlighting lessons learned during the development and application of EÎMC2
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