Fault-tolerant concurrent branch and bound algorithms derived from program verification

The process of showing that a program satisfies some particular properties with respect to its specification is called program verification. Axiomatic semantics is a verification method that makes assertions describing properties about the states of the program. There exists a transformation from the assertions of the verification proof of a program to executable assertions. These executable assertions may be embedded in the program to create a fault-tolerant program. While this approach has been applied to the sequential programming environment, the distributed programming environment presents special challenges. This paper focuses on applying concurrent programming axiomatic proof systems to generate executable assertions in a distributed environment using distributed branch and bound as a model problem.