Compositional Verification of Knowledge-Based Systems in Temporal Epistemic Logic

It is a recent trend in the literature on verification to study the use of compositionality and abstraction to structure the process of verification; for example, see (Abadi and Lamport, 1993; Hooman, 1994; Dams, Gerth and Kelb, 1996). In (Cornelissen, Jonker and Treur, 1997) a compositional verification method was introduced for logic-based specifications of knowledge-based systems. The current paper discusses the requirements for the choice and use of a suitable logic with which verification proofs of such compositional reasoning systems can be formalized. For the particular application of the logic the following requirements for the logic itself and for the use of the logic are of importance: • compositional structure: proofs can be structured in a compositional manner, in accordance with the compositional structure of the system design. • dynamics and time: dynamic properties can be expressed, reasoning and induction over time is possible. • incomplete information states can be expressed. • transparency: the proof system and the semantics are transparent and not unnecessarily complicated.