Formal Study of Plane Delaunay Triangulation

This article presents the formal proof of correctness for a plane Delaunay triangulation algorithm. It consists in repeating a sequence of edge flippings from an initial triangulation until the Delaunay property is achieved. To describe triangulations, we rely on a combinatorial hypermap specification framework we have been developing for years. We embed hypermaps in the plane by attaching coordinates to elements in a consistent way. We then describe what are legal and illegal Delaunay edges and a flipping operation which we show preserves hypermap, triangulation, and embedding invariants. To prove the termination of the algorithm, we use a generic approach expressing that any non-cyclic relation is well-founded when working on a finite set.