931 research outputs found
BEval: A Plug-in to Extend Atelier B with Current Verification Technologies
This paper presents BEval, an extension of Atelier B to improve automation in
the verification activities in the B method or Event-B. It combines a tool for
managing and verifying software projects (Atelier B) and a model
checker/animator (ProB) so that the verification conditions generated in the
former are evaluated with the latter. In our experiments, the two main
verification strategies (manual and automatic) showed significant improvement
as ProB's evaluator proves complementary to Atelier B built-in provers. We
conducted experiments with the B model of a micro-controller instruction set;
several verification conditions, that we were not able to discharge
automatically or manually with AtelierB's provers, were automatically verified
using BEval.Comment: In Proceedings LAFM 2013, arXiv:1401.056
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
UTP2: Higher-Order Equational Reasoning by Pointing
We describe a prototype theorem prover, UTP2, developed to match the style of
hand-written proof work in the Unifying Theories of Programming semantical
framework. This is based on alphabetised predicates in a 2nd-order logic, with
a strong emphasis on equational reasoning. We present here an overview of the
user-interface of this prover, which was developed from the outset using a
point-and-click approach. We contrast this with the command-line paradigm that
continues to dominate the mainstream theorem provers, and raises the question:
can we have the best of both worlds?Comment: In Proceedings UITP 2014, arXiv:1410.785
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