355 research outputs found
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
SAT-Based Synthesis Methods for Safety Specs
Automatic synthesis of hardware components from declarative specifications is
an ambitious endeavor in computer aided design. Existing synthesis algorithms
are often implemented with Binary Decision Diagrams (BDDs), inheriting their
scalability limitations. Instead of BDDs, we propose several new methods to
synthesize finite-state systems from safety specifications using decision
procedures for the satisfiability of quantified and unquantified Boolean
formulas (SAT-, QBF- and EPR-solvers). The presented approaches are based on
computational learning, templates, or reduction to first-order logic. We also
present an efficient parallelization, and optimizations to utilize reachability
information and incremental solving. Finally, we compare all methods in an
extensive case study. Our new methods outperform BDDs and other existing work
on some classes of benchmarks, and our parallelization achieves a super-linear
speedup. This is an extended version of [5], featuring an additional appendix.Comment: Extended version of a paper at VMCAI'1
On QBF Proofs and Preprocessing
QBFs (quantified boolean formulas), which are a superset of propositional
formulas, provide a canonical representation for PSPACE problems. To overcome
the inherent complexity of QBF, significant effort has been invested in
developing QBF solvers as well as the underlying proof systems. At the same
time, formula preprocessing is crucial for the application of QBF solvers. This
paper focuses on a missing link in currently-available technology: How to
obtain a certificate (e.g. proof) for a formula that had been preprocessed
before it was given to a solver? The paper targets a suite of commonly-used
preprocessing techniques and shows how to reconstruct certificates for them. On
the negative side, the paper discusses certain limitations of the
currently-used proof systems in the light of preprocessing. The presented
techniques were implemented and evaluated in the state-of-the-art QBF
preprocessor bloqqer.Comment: LPAR 201
Relation-changing modal operators
We study dynamic modal operators that can change the accessibility relation of a model during the evaluation of a formula. In particular, we extend the basic modal language with modalities that are able to delete, add or swap an edge between pairs of elements of the domain. We define a generic framework to characterize this kind of operations. First, we investigate relation-changing modal logics as fragments of classical logics. Then, we use the new framework to get a suitable notion of bisimulation for the logics introduced, and we investigate their expressive power. Finally, we show that the complexity of the model checking problem for the particular operators introduced is PSpace-complete, and we study two subproblems of model checking: formula complexity and program complexity.Fil: Areces, Carlos Eduardo. Universidad Nacional de CĆ³rdoba. Facultad de MatemĆ”tica, AstronomĆa y FĆsica; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones CientĆficas y TĆ©cnicas; ArgentinaFil: Fervari, Raul Alberto. Universidad Nacional de CĆ³rdoba. Facultad de MatemĆ”tica, AstronomĆa y FĆsica; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones CientĆficas y TĆ©cnicas; ArgentinaFil: Hoffmann, Guillaume Emmanuel. Universidad Nacional de CĆ³rdoba. Facultad de MatemĆ”tica, AstronomĆa y FĆsica; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones CientĆficas y TĆ©cnicas; Argentin
The Complexity of Reasoning with FODD and GFODD
Recent work introduced Generalized First Order Decision Diagrams (GFODD) as a
knowledge representation that is useful in mechanizing decision theoretic
planning in relational domains. GFODDs generalize function-free first order
logic and include numerical values and numerical generalizations of existential
and universal quantification. Previous work presented heuristic inference
algorithms for GFODDs and implemented these heuristics in systems for decision
theoretic planning. In this paper, we study the complexity of the computational
problems addressed by such implementations. In particular, we study the
evaluation problem, the satisfiability problem, and the equivalence problem for
GFODDs under the assumption that the size of the intended model is given with
the problem, a restriction that guarantees decidability. Our results provide a
complete characterization placing these problems within the polynomial
hierarchy. The same characterization applies to the corresponding restriction
of problems in first order logic, giving an interesting new avenue for
efficient inference when the number of objects is bounded. Our results show
that for formulas, and for corresponding GFODDs, evaluation and
satisfiability are complete, and equivalence is
complete. For formulas evaluation is complete, satisfiability
is one level higher and is complete, and equivalence is
complete.Comment: A short version of this paper appears in AAAI 2014. Version 2
includes a reorganization and some expanded proof
A QBF-based Formalization of Abstract Argumentation Semantics
Supported by the National Research Fund, Luxembourg (LAAMI project) and by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC, UK), grant ref. EP/J012084/1 (SAsSY project).Peer reviewedPostprin
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