New results on rewrite-based satisfiability procedures

Program analysis and verification require decision procedures to reason on theories of data structures. Many problems can be reduced to the satisfiability of sets of ground literals in theory T. If a sound and complete inference system for first-order logic is guaranteed to terminate on T-satisfiability problems, any theorem-proving strategy with that system and a fair search plan is a T-satisfiability procedure. We prove termination of a rewrite-based first-order engine on the theories of records, integer offsets, integer offsets modulo and lists. We give a modularity theorem stating sufficient conditions for termination on a combinations of theories, given termination on each. The above theories, as well as others, satisfy these conditions. We introduce several sets of benchmarks on these theories and their combinations, including both parametric synthetic benchmarks to test scalability, and real-world problems to test performances on huge sets of literals. We compare the rewrite-based theorem prover E with the validity checkers CVC and CVC Lite. Contrary to the folklore that a general-purpose prover cannot compete with reasoners with built-in theories, the experiments are overall favorable to the theorem prover, showing that not only the rewriting approach is elegant and conceptually simple, but has important practical implications.Comment: To appear in the ACM Transactions on Computational Logic, 49 page

Effective Theorem Proving for Hardware Verification

. The attractiveness of using theorem provers for system design verification lies in their generality. The major practical challenge confronting theorem proving technology is in combining this generality with an acceptable degree of automation. We describe an approach for enhancing the effectiveness of theorem provers for hardware verification through the use of efficient automatic procedures for rewriting, arithmetic and equality reasoning, and an off-the-shelf BDD-based propositional simplifier. These automatic procedures can be combined into general-purpose proof strategies that can efficiently automate a number of proofs including those of hardware correctness. The inference procedures and proof strategies have been implemented in the PVS verification system. They are applied to several examples including an N-bit adder, the Saxe pipelined processor, and the benchmark Tamarack microprocessor design. These examples illustrate the basic design philosophy underlying PVS where powerful..

Analysis of a Biphase Mark Protocol with Uppaal and PVS

Contains fulltext : 36086.pdf (preprint version ) (Open Access

Termination of Constraint Contextual Rewriting

The effective integration of decision procedures in formula simplication is a fundamental problem in mechanical verication. The main source of diculty occurs when the decision procedure is asked to solve goals containing symbols which are interpreted for the prover but uninterpreted for the decision procedure. To cope with the problem, Boyer & Moore proposed a technique, called augmentation, which extends the information available to the decision procedure with suitably selected facts. Constraint Contextual Rewriting (CCR, for short) is an extended form of contextual rewriting which generalizes the Boyer & Moore integration schema. In this paper we give a detailed account of the control issues related to the termination of CCR. These are particularly subtle and complicated since augmentation is mutually dependent from rewriting and it must be prevented from indefinitely extending the set of facts available to the decision procedure. A proof of termination of CCR is given