22 research outputs found
Collaborative Verification-Driven Engineering of Hybrid Systems
Hybrid systems with both discrete and continuous dynamics are an important
model for real-world cyber-physical systems. The key challenge is to ensure
their correct functioning w.r.t. safety requirements. Promising techniques to
ensure safety seem to be model-driven engineering to develop hybrid systems in
a well-defined and traceable manner, and formal verification to prove their
correctness. Their combination forms the vision of verification-driven
engineering. Often, hybrid systems are rather complex in that they require
expertise from many domains (e.g., robotics, control systems, computer science,
software engineering, and mechanical engineering). Moreover, despite the
remarkable progress in automating formal verification of hybrid systems, the
construction of proofs of complex systems often requires nontrivial human
guidance, since hybrid systems verification tools solve undecidable problems.
It is, thus, not uncommon for development and verification teams to consist of
many players with diverse expertise. This paper introduces a
verification-driven engineering toolset that extends our previous work on
hybrid and arithmetic verification with tools for (i) graphical (UML) and
textual modeling of hybrid systems, (ii) exchanging and comparing models and
proofs, and (iii) managing verification tasks. This toolset makes it easier to
tackle large-scale verification tasks
A Vision of Collaborative Verification-Driven Engineering of Hybrid Systems
Abstract. Hybrid systems with both discrete and continuous dynamics are an important model for real-world physical systems. The key challenge is how to ensure their correct functioning w.r.t. safety requirements. Promising techniques to ensure safety seem to be model-driven engineering to develop hybrid systems in a well-defined and traceable manner, and formal verification to prove their correctness. Their combination forms the vision of verification-driven engineering. Despite the remarkable progress in automating formal verification of hybrid systems, the construction of proofs of complex systems often requires significant human guidance, since hybrid systems verification tools solve undecidable problems. It is thus not uncommon for verification teams to consist of many players with diverse expertise. This paper introduces a verification-driven engineering toolset that extends our previous work on hybrid and arithmetic verification with tools for (i) modeling hybrid systems, (ii) exchanging and comparing models and proofs, and (iii) managing verification tasks. This toolset makes it easier to tackle large-scale verification tasks.
Combined decision procedures for nonlinear arithmetics, real and complex
We describe contributions to algorithmic proof techniques for deciding the satisfiability
of boolean combinations of many-variable nonlinear polynomial equations and
inequalities over the real and complex numbers.
In the first half, we present an abstract theory of Grobner basis construction algorithms
for algebraically closed fields of characteristic zero and use it to introduce
and prove the correctness of Grobner basis methods tailored to the needs of modern
satisfiability modulo theories (SMT) solvers. In the process, we use the technique of
proof orders to derive a generalisation of S-polynomial superfluousness in terms of
transfinite induction along an ordinal parameterised by a monomial order. We use this
generalisation to prove the abstract (âstrategy-independentâ) admissibility of a number
of superfluous S-polynomial criteria important for efficient basis construction. Finally,
we consider local notions of proof minimality for weak Nullstellensatz proofs and give
ideal-theoretic methods for computing complex âunsatisfiable coresâ which contribute
to efficient SMT solving in the context of nonlinear complex arithmetic.
In the second half, we consider the problem of effectively combining a heterogeneous
collection of decision techniques for fragments of the existential theory of real
closed fields. We propose and investigate a number of novel combined decision methods
and implement them in our proof tool RAHD (Real Algebra in High Dimensions).
We build a hierarchy of increasingly powerful combined decision methods, culminating
in a generalisation of partial cylindrical algebraic decomposition (CAD) which we
call Abstract Partial CAD. This generalisation incorporates the use of arbitrary sound
but possibly incomplete proof procedures for the existential theory of real closed fields
as first-class functional parameters for âshort-circuitingâ expensive computations during
the lifting phase of CAD. Identifying these proof procedure parameters formally
with RAHD proof strategies, we implement the method in RAHD for the case of
full-dimensional cell decompositions and investigate its efficacy with respect to the
Brown-McCallum projection operator.
We end with some wishes for the future