1,321 research outputs found
Numerical Verification of Affine Systems with up to a Billion Dimensions
Affine systems reachability is the basis of many verification methods. With
further computation, methods exist to reason about richer models with inputs,
nonlinear differential equations, and hybrid dynamics. As such, the scalability
of affine systems verification is a prerequisite to scalable analysis for more
complex systems. In this paper, we improve the scalability of affine systems
verification, in terms of the number of dimensions (variables) in the system.
The reachable states of affine systems can be written in terms of the matrix
exponential, and safety checking can be performed at specific time steps with
linear programming. Unfortunately, for large systems with many state variables,
this direct approach requires an intractable amount of memory while using an
intractable amount of computation time. We overcome these challenges by
combining several methods that leverage common problem structure. Memory is
reduced by exploiting initial states that are not full-dimensional and safety
properties (outputs) over a few linear projections of the state variables.
Computation time is saved by using numerical simulations to compute only
projections of the matrix exponential relevant for the verification problem.
Since large systems often have sparse dynamics, we use Krylov-subspace
simulation approaches based on the Arnoldi or Lanczos iterations. Our method
produces accurate counter-examples when properties are violated and, in the
extreme case with sufficient problem structure, can analyze a system with one
billion real-valued state variables
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
Workshop on Verification and Theorem Proving for Continuous Systems (NetCA Workshop 2005)
Oxford, UK, 26 August 200
On the use of MTBDDs for performability analysis and verification of stochastic systems
AbstractThis paper describes how to employ multi-terminal binary decision diagrams (MTBDDs) for the construction and analysis of a general class of models that exhibit stochastic, probabilistic and non-deterministic behaviour. It is shown how the notorious problem of state space explosion can be circumvented by compositionally constructing symbolic (i.e. MTBDD-based) representations of complex systems from small-scale components. We emphasise, however, that compactness of the representation can only be achieved if heuristics are applied with insight into the structure of the system under investigation. We report on our experiences concerning compact representation, performance analysis and verification of performability properties
A Semantic Account of Rigorous Simulation
Hybrid systems are a powerful formalism for modeling cyber-physical systems. Reachability analysis is a general method for checking safety properties, especially in the presence of uncertainty and non-determinism. Rigorous simulation is a convenient tool for reachability analysis of hybrid systems. However, to serve as proof tool, a rigorous simulator must be correct wrt a clearly defined notion of reachability,which captures what is intuitively eachable in finite time. As a step towards addressing this challenge, this paper presents a rigorous simulator in the form of an operational semantics and a specification in the form of a denotational semantics. We show that, under certain conditions about the representation of enclosures, the rigorous simulator is correct. We also show that finding a representation satisfying these assumptions is non-trivial
A Logical Product Approach to Zonotope Intersection
We define and study a new abstract domain which is a fine-grained combination
of zonotopes with polyhedric domains such as the interval, octagon, linear
templates or polyhedron domain. While abstract transfer functions are still
rather inexpensive and accurate even for interpreting non-linear computations,
we are able to also interpret tests (i.e. intersections) efficiently. This
fixes a known drawback of zonotopic methods, as used for reachability analysis
for hybrid sys- tems as well as for invariant generation in abstract
interpretation: intersection of zonotopes are not always zonotopes, and there
is not even a best zonotopic over-approximation of the intersection. We
describe some examples and an im- plementation of our method in the APRON
library, and discuss some further in- teresting combinations of zonotopes with
non-linear or non-convex domains such as quadratic templates and maxplus
polyhedra
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