2,180 research outputs found
Initial Experiments with TPTP-style Automated Theorem Provers on ACL2 Problems
This paper reports our initial experiments with using external ATP on some
corpora built with the ACL2 system. This is intended to provide the first
estimate about the usefulness of such external reasoning and AI systems for
solving ACL2 problems.Comment: In Proceedings ACL2 2014, arXiv:1406.123
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
Methods to Model-Check Parallel Systems Software
We report on an effort to develop methodologies for formal verification of
parts of the Multi-Purpose Daemon (MPD) parallel process management system. MPD
is a distributed collection of communicating processes. While the individual
components of the collection execute simple algorithms, their interaction leads
to unexpected errors that are difficult to uncover by conventional means. Two
verification approaches are discussed here: the standard model checking
approach using the software model checker SPIN and the nonstandard use of a
general-purpose first-order resolution-style theorem prover OTTER to conduct
the traditional state space exploration. We compare modeling methodology and
analyze performance and scalability of the two methods with respect to
verification of MPD.Comment: 12 pages, 3 figures, 1 tabl
TLA+ Proofs
TLA+ is a specification language based on standard set theory and temporal
logic that has constructs for hierarchical proofs. We describe how to write
TLA+ proofs and check them with TLAPS, the TLA+ Proof System. We use Peterson's
mutual exclusion algorithm as a simple example to describe the features of
TLAPS and show how it and the Toolbox (an IDE for TLA+) help users to manage
large, complex proofs.Comment: A shorter version of this article appeared in the proceedings of the
conference Formal Methods 2012 (FM 2012, Paris, France, Springer LNCS 7436,
pp. 147-154
Compensation methods to support cooperative applications: A case study in automated verification of schema requirements for an advanced transaction model
Compensation plays an important role in advanced transaction models, cooperative work and workflow systems. A schema designer is typically required to supply for each transaction another transaction to semantically undo the effects of . Little attention has been paid to the verification of the desirable properties of such operations, however. This paper demonstrates the use of a higher-order logic theorem prover for verifying that compensating transactions return a database to its original state. It is shown how an OODB schema is translated to the language of the theorem prover so that proofs can be performed on the compensating transactions
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