Formal study of plane Delaunay triangulation

This article presents the formal proof of correctness for a plane Delaunay triangulation algorithm. It consists in repeating a sequence of edge flippings from an initial triangulation until the Delaunay property is achieved. To describe triangulations, we rely on a combinatorial hypermap specification framework we have been developing for years. We embed hypermaps in the plane by attaching coordinates to elements in a consistent way. We then describe what are legal and illegal Delaunay edges and a flipping operation which we show preserves hypermap, triangulation, and embedding invariants. To prove the termination of the algorithm, we use a generic approach expressing that any non-cyclic relation is well-founded when working on a finite set

Formal Verification of a Geometry Algorithm: A Quest for Abstract Views and Symmetry in Coq Proofs

This extended abstract is about an effort to build a formal description of a triangulation algorithm starting with a naive description of the algorithm where triangles, edges, and triangulations are simply given as sets and the most complex notions are those of boundary and separating edges. When performing proofs about this algorithm, questions of symmetry appear and this exposition attempts to give an account of how these symmetries can be handled. All this work relies on formal developments made with Coq and the mathematical components library

Formal Verification of a Geometry Algorithm: A Quest for Abstract Views and Symmetry in Coq Proofs

International audienceThis extended abstract is about an effort to build a formal description of a triangulation algorithm starting with a naive description of the algorithm where triangles, edges, and triangulations are simply given as sets and the most complex notions are those of boundary and separating edges. When performing proofs about this algorithm, questions of symmetry appear and this exposition attempts to give an account of how these symmetries can be handled. All this work relies on formal developments made with Coq and the mathematical components library

A Verified Algorithm for Geometric Zonotope/Hyperplane Intersection

To perform rigorous numerical computations, one can use a gen-eralization of interval arithmetic, namely affine arithmetic (AA), which works with zonotopes instead of intervals. Zonotopes are also widely used for reachability analysis of continuous or hybrid systems, where an important operation is the geometric intersection of zonotopes with hyperplanes. We have implemented a functional algorithm to compute the zonotope/hyperplane intersection and verified it in Isabelle/HOL. The algorithm is similar to convex hull computations, our verifica-tion is therefore inspired by Knuth’s axioms for an orientation pred-icate of points in the plane, which have been successfully used to verify convex hull algorithms. The interesting fact is that we com-bine a mixture of different fields: a discrete geometrical algorithm to perform operations on the continuous sets represented by zono-topes

Intuition in formal proof : a novel framework for combining mathematical tools

This doctoral thesis addresses one major difficulty in formal proof: removing obstructions to intuition which hamper the proof endeavour. We investigate this in the context of formally verifying geometric algorithms using the theorem prover Isabelle, by first proving the Graham’s Scan algorithm for finding convex hulls, then using the challenges we encountered as motivations for the design of a general, modular framework for combining mathematical tools. We introduce our integration framework — the Prover’s Palette, describing in detail the guiding principles from software engineering and the key differentiator of our approach — emphasising the role of the user. Two integrations are described, using the framework to extend Eclipse Proof General so that the computer algebra systems QEPCAD and Maple are directly available in an Isabelle proof context, capable of running either fully automated or with user customisation. The versatility of the approach is illustrated by showing a variety of ways that these tools can be used to streamline the theorem proving process, enriching the user’s intuition rather than disrupting it. The usefulness of our approach is then demonstrated through the formal verification of an algorithm for computing Delaunay triangulations in the Prover’s Palette