On Sound Relative Error Bounds for Floating-Point Arithmetic

State-of-the-art static analysis tools for verifying finite-precision code compute worst-case absolute error bounds on numerical errors. These are, however, often not a good estimate of accuracy as they do not take into account the magnitude of the computed values. Relative errors, which compute errors relative to the value's magnitude, are thus preferable. While today's tools do report relative error bounds, these are merely computed via absolute errors and thus not necessarily tight or more informative. Furthermore, whenever the computed value is close to zero on part of the domain, the tools do not report any relative error estimate at all. Surprisingly, the quality of relative error bounds computed by today's tools has not been systematically studied or reported to date. In this paper, we investigate how state-of-the-art static techniques for computing sound absolute error bounds can be used, extended and combined for the computation of relative errors. Our experiments on a standard benchmark set show that computing relative errors directly, as opposed to via absolute errors, is often beneficial and can provide error estimates up to six orders of magnitude tighter, i.e. more accurate. We also show that interval subdivision, another commonly used technique to reduce over-approximations, has less benefit when computing relative errors directly, but it can help to alleviate the effects of the inherent issue of relative error estimates close to zero

The Parma Polyhedra Library: Toward a Complete Set of Numerical Abstractions for the Analysis and Verification of Hardware and Software Systems

Since its inception as a student project in 2001, initially just for the handling (as the name implies) of convex polyhedra, the Parma Polyhedra Library has been continuously improved and extended by joining scrupulous research on the theoretical foundations of (possibly non-convex) numerical abstractions to a total adherence to the best available practices in software development. Even though it is still not fully mature and functionally complete, the Parma Polyhedra Library already offers a combination of functionality, reliability, usability and performance that is not matched by similar, freely available libraries. In this paper, we present the main features of the current version of the library, emphasizing those that distinguish it from other similar libraries and those that are important for applications in the field of analysis and verification of hardware and software systems.Comment: 38 pages, 2 figures, 3 listings, 3 table

A Generic Synthesis Algorithm for Well-Defined Parametric Design

This paper aims to improve the way synthesis tools can be built by formalizing: 1) the design artefact, 2) related knowledge and 3) an algorithm to generate solutions. This paper focuses on well-defined parametric engineering design, ranging from machine elements to industrial products. A design artefact is formalized in terms of parameters and topology elements. The knowledge is classified in three types: resolving rules to determine parameter values, constraining rules to restrict parameter values and expansion rules to add elements to the topology. A synthesis algorithm, based on an opportunistic design strategy, is described and tested for three design cases

Chaining Test Cases for Reactive System Testing (extended version)

Testing of synchronous reactive systems is challenging because long input sequences are often needed to drive them into a state at which a desired feature can be tested. This is particularly problematic in on-target testing, where a system is tested in its real-life application environment and the time required for resetting is high. This paper presents an approach to discovering a test case chain---a single software execution that covers a group of test goals and minimises overall test execution time. Our technique targets the scenario in which test goals for the requirements are given as safety properties. We give conditions for the existence and minimality of a single test case chain and minimise the number of test chains if a single test chain is infeasible. We report experimental results with a prototype tool for C code generated from Simulink models and compare it to state-of-the-art test suite generators.Comment: extended version of paper published at ICTSS'1

On conflict-driven reasoning

Automated formal methods and automated reasoning are interconnected, as formal methods generate reasoning problems and incorporate reasoning techniques. For example, formal methods tools employ reasoning engines to find solutions of sets of constraints, or proofs of conjectures. From a reasoning perspective, the expressivity of the logical language is often directly proportional to the difficulty of the problem. In propositional logic, Conflict-Driven Clause Learning (CDCL) is one of the key features of state-of-the-art satisfiability solvers. The idea is to restrict inferences to those needed to explain conflicts, and use conflicts to prune a backtracking search. A current research direction in automated reasoning is to generalize this notion of conflict-driven satisfiability to a paradigm of conflict-driven reasoning in first-order theories for satisfiability modulo theories and assignments, and even in full first-order logic for generic automated theorem proving. While this is a promising and exciting lead, it also poses formidable challenges