480 research outputs found
Algebraic Principles for Rely-Guarantee Style Concurrency Verification Tools
We provide simple equational principles for deriving rely-guarantee-style
inference rules and refinement laws based on idempotent semirings. We link the
algebraic layer with concrete models of programs based on languages and
execution traces. We have implemented the approach in Isabelle/HOL as a
lightweight concurrency verification tool that supports reasoning about the
control and data flow of concurrent programs with shared variables at different
levels of abstraction. This is illustrated on two simple verification examples
Stone-Type Dualities for Separation Logics
Stone-type duality theorems, which relate algebraic and
relational/topological models, are important tools in logic because -- in
addition to elegant abstraction -- they strengthen soundness and completeness
to a categorical equivalence, yielding a framework through which both algebraic
and topological methods can be brought to bear on a logic. We give a systematic
treatment of Stone-type duality for the structures that interpret bunched
logics, starting with the weakest systems, recovering the familiar BI and
Boolean BI (BBI), and extending to both classical and intuitionistic Separation
Logic. We demonstrate the uniformity and modularity of this analysis by
additionally capturing the bunched logics obtained by extending BI and BBI with
modalities and multiplicative connectives corresponding to disjunction,
negation and falsum. This includes the logic of separating modalities (LSM), De
Morgan BI (DMBI), Classical BI (CBI), and the sub-classical family of logics
extending Bi-intuitionistic (B)BI (Bi(B)BI). We additionally obtain as
corollaries soundness and completeness theorems for the specific Kripke-style
models of these logics as presented in the literature: for DMBI, the
sub-classical logics extending BiBI and a new bunched logic, Concurrent Kleene
BI (connecting our work to Concurrent Separation Logic), this is the first time
soundness and completeness theorems have been proved. We thus obtain a
comprehensive semantic account of the multiplicative variants of all standard
propositional connectives in the bunched logic setting. This approach
synthesises a variety of techniques from modal, substructural and categorical
logic and contextualizes the "resource semantics" interpretation underpinning
Separation Logic amongst them
A synchronous program algebra: a basis for reasoning about shared-memory and event-based concurrency
This research started with an algebra for reasoning about rely/guarantee
concurrency for a shared memory model. The approach taken led to a more
abstract algebra of atomic steps, in which atomic steps synchronise (rather
than interleave) when composed in parallel. The algebra of rely/guarantee
concurrency then becomes an instantiation of the more abstract algebra. Many of
the core properties needed for rely/guarantee reasoning can be shown to hold in
the abstract algebra where their proofs are simpler and hence allow a higher
degree of automation. The algebra has been encoded in Isabelle/HOL to provide a
basis for tool support for program verification.
In rely/guarantee concurrency, programs are specified to guarantee certain
behaviours until assumptions about the behaviour of their environment are
violated. When assumptions are violated, program behaviour is unconstrained
(aborting), and guarantees need no longer hold. To support these guarantees a
second synchronous operator, weak conjunction, was introduced: both processes
in a weak conjunction must agree to take each atomic step, unless one aborts in
which case the whole aborts. In developing the laws for parallel and weak
conjunction we found many properties were shared by the operators and that the
proofs of many laws were essentially the same. This insight led to the idea of
generalising synchronisation to an abstract operator with only the axioms that
are shared by the parallel and weak conjunction operator, so that those two
operators can be viewed as instantiations of the abstract synchronisation
operator. The main differences between parallel and weak conjunction are how
they combine individual atomic steps; that is left open in the axioms for the
abstract operator.Comment: Extended version of a Formal Methods 2016 paper, "An algebra of
synchronous atomic steps
On partial order semantics for SAT/SMT-based symbolic encodings of weak memory concurrency
Concurrent systems are notoriously difficult to analyze, and technological
advances such as weak memory architectures greatly compound this problem. This
has renewed interest in partial order semantics as a theoretical foundation for
formal verification techniques. Among these, symbolic techniques have been
shown to be particularly effective at finding concurrency-related bugs because
they can leverage highly optimized decision procedures such as SAT/SMT solvers.
This paper gives new fundamental results on partial order semantics for
SAT/SMT-based symbolic encodings of weak memory concurrency. In particular, we
give the theoretical basis for a decision procedure that can handle a fragment
of concurrent programs endowed with least fixed point operators. In addition,
we show that a certain partial order semantics of relaxed sequential
consistency is equivalent to the conjunction of three extensively studied weak
memory axioms by Alglave et al. An important consequence of this equivalence is
an asymptotically smaller symbolic encoding for bounded model checking which
has only a quadratic number of partial order constraints compared to the
state-of-the-art cubic-size encoding.Comment: 15 pages, 3 figure
Concurrent Kleene Algebra with Tests and Branching Automata
We introduce concurrent Kleene algebra with tests (CKAT) as a combination of Kleene algebra with tests (KAT) of Kozen and Smith with concurrent Kleene algebras (CKA), introduced by Hoare, Möller, Struth and Wehrman. CKAT provides a relatively simple algebraic model for reasoning about semantics of concurrent programs. We generalize guarded strings to guarded series-parallel strings , or gsp-strings, to give a concrete language model for CKAT. Combining nondeterministic guarded automata of Kozen with branching automata of Lodaya and Weil one obtains a model for processing gsp-strings in parallel. To ensure that the model satisfies the weak exchange law (x‖y)(z‖w)≤(xz)‖(yw) of CKA, we make use of the subsumption order of Gischer on the gsp-strings. We also define deterministic branching automata and investigate their relation to (nondeterministic) branching automata. To express basic concurrent algorithms, we define concurrent deterministic flowchart schemas and relate them to branching automata and to concurrent Kleene algebras with tests
Kleene Algebra with Observations
Kleene algebra with tests (KAT) is an algebraic framework for reasoning about the control flow of sequential programs. Generalising KAT to reason about concurrent programs is not straightforward, because axioms native to KAT in conjunction with expected axioms for concurrency lead to an anomalous equation. In this paper, we propose Kleene algebra with observations (KAO), a variant of KAT, as an alternative foundation for extending KAT to a concurrent setting. We characterise the free model of KAO, and establish a decision procedure w.r.t. its equational theory
In praise of algebra
We survey the well-known algebraic laws of sequential programming, and extend them with some less familiar laws for concurrent programming. We give an algebraic definition of the Hoare triple, and algebraic proofs of all the relevant laws for concurrent separation logic. We give the provable concurrency laws for Milner transitions, for the Back/Morgan refinement calculus, and for Dijkstra's weakest preconditions. We end with a section in praise of algebra, of which Carroll Morgan is such a maste
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