Summary of the Research Done during the Sabbatical Year from Oct . 2005 to Sept . 2006 at the Università degli Studi di Milano Department of Computer Science

Catching bugs in programs is difficult and time-consuming. The effort of debugging and proving correct even small units of code can surpass the effort of programming. Bugs inserted while “programming in the small” can have dramatic consequences for the consistency of a whole software system as shown, e.g., by viruses which can spread by exploiting buffer overflows, a bug which typically arises while coding a small portion of code. To detect this kind of errors, many verification techniques have been put forward such as static analysis and software model checking. Recently, in the program verification community, there seems to be a growing demand for more declarative approaches in order to make the results of the analysis readily available to the end user. To meet this requirement, a growing number of program verification tools integrate some automated deduction techniques. A crucial requirement for such techniques to be readily exploited in this context is their predictability, i.e. they must be efficient and terminate for a large class of properties of interest for program verification. The goal of my research is to develop predictable automated deduction techniques supporting program verification for a large class of properties.