Consistency and Completeness of Rewriting in the Calculus of Constructions

Adding rewriting to a proof assistant based on the Curry-Howard isomorphism, such as Coq, may greatly improve usability of the tool. Unfortunately adding an arbitrary set of rewrite rules may render the underlying formal system undecidable and inconsistent. While ways to ensure termination and confluence, and hence decidability of type-checking, have already been studied to some extent, logical consistency has got little attention so far. In this paper we show that consistency is a consequence of canonicity, which in turn follows from the assumption that all functions defined by rewrite rules are complete. We provide a sound and terminating, but necessarily incomplete algorithm to verify this property. The algorithm accepts all definitions that follow dependent pattern matching schemes presented by Coquand and studied by McBride in his PhD thesis. It also accepts many definitions by rewriting, containing rules which depart from standard pattern matching.Comment: 20 page

Efficient Solving of Quantified Inequality Constraints over the Real Numbers

Let a quantified inequality constraint over the reals be a formula in the first-order predicate language over the structure of the real numbers, where the allowed predicate symbols are $\leq$ and $<$. Solving such constraints is an undecidable problem when allowing function symbols such $\sin$ or $\cos$. In the paper we give an algorithm that terminates with a solution for all, except for very special, pathological inputs. We ensure the practical efficiency of this algorithm by employing constraint programming techniques

Conjunctive Query Answering for the Description Logic SHIQ

Conjunctive queries play an important role as an expressive query language for Description Logics (DLs). Although modern DLs usually provide for transitive roles, conjunctive query answering over DL knowledge bases is only poorly understood if transitive roles are admitted in the query. In this paper, we consider unions of conjunctive queries over knowledge bases formulated in the prominent DL SHIQ and allow transitive roles in both the query and the knowledge base. We show decidability of query answering in this setting and establish two tight complexity bounds: regarding combined complexity, we prove that there is a deterministic algorithm for query answering that needs time single exponential in the size of the KB and double exponential in the size of the query, which is optimal. Regarding data complexity, we prove containment in co-NP

On Verifying Complex Properties using Symbolic Shape Analysis

One of the main challenges in the verification of software systems is the analysis of unbounded data structures with dynamic memory allocation, such as linked data structures and arrays. We describe Bohne, a new analysis for verifying data structures. Bohne verifies data structure operations and shows that 1) the operations preserve data structure invariants and 2) the operations satisfy their specifications expressed in terms of changes to the set of objects stored in the data structure. During the analysis, Bohne infers loop invariants in the form of disjunctions of universally quantified Boolean combinations of formulas. To synthesize loop invariants of this form, Bohne uses a combination of decision procedures for Monadic Second-Order Logic over trees, SMT-LIB decision procedures (currently CVC Lite), and an automated reasoner within the Isabelle interactive theorem prover. This architecture shows that synthesized loop invariants can serve as a useful communication mechanism between different decision procedures. Using Bohne, we have verified operations on data structures such as linked lists with iterators and back pointers, trees with and without parent pointers, two-level skip lists, array data structures, and sorted lists. We have deployed Bohne in the Hob and Jahob data structure analysis systems, enabling us to combine Bohne with analyses of data structure clients and apply it in the context of larger programs. This report describes the Bohne algorithm as well as techniques that Bohne uses to reduce the ammount of annotations and the running time of the analysis

Efficient Generation of Craig Interpolants in Satisfiability Modulo Theories

The problem of computing Craig Interpolants has recently received a lot of interest. In this paper, we address the problem of efficient generation of interpolants for some important fragments of first order logic, which are amenable for effective decision procedures, called Satisfiability Modulo Theory solvers. We make the following contributions. First, we provide interpolation procedures for several basic theories of interest: the theories of linear arithmetic over the rationals, difference logic over rationals and integers, and UTVPI over rationals and integers. Second, we define a novel approach to interpolate combinations of theories, that applies to the Delayed Theory Combination approach. Efficiency is ensured by the fact that the proposed interpolation algorithms extend state of the art algorithms for Satisfiability Modulo Theories. Our experimental evaluation shows that the MathSAT SMT solver can produce interpolants with minor overhead in search, and much more efficiently than other competitor solvers.Comment: submitted to ACM Transactions on Computational Logic (TOCL