Applications of real number theorem proving in PVS

This work is supported by funding from the EPSRC under grants EP/H500162, EP/F02309X and GR/S31242Real number theorem proving has many uses, particularly for verification of safety critical systems and systems for which design errors may be costly. We discuss a chain of developments building on real number theorem proving in PVS. This leads from the verification of aspects of an air traffic control system, through work on the integration of computer algebra and automated theorem proving to a new tool, NRV, first presented here that builds on the capabilities of Maple and PVS to provide a verified and automatic analysis of Nichols plots. This automates a standard technique used by control engineers and greatly improves assurance compared with the traditional method of visual inspection of the Nichols plots.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Design Verification for Control Engineering

We introduce control engineering as a new domain of application for formal methods. We discuss design verification, drawing attention to the role played by diagrammatic evaluation criteria involving numeric plots of a design, such as Nichols and Bode plots. We show that symbolic computation and computational logic can be used to discharge these criteria and provide symbolic, automated, and very general alternatives to these standard numeric tests. We illustrate our work with reference to a standard reference model drawn from military avionics