This thesis is about the development and usage of deductive methods in two main areas: (i) the deductive dis-verification of programs, i.e., how techniques for deductive verification of programs can be used to detect program defects, and (ii) reasoning modulo integer arithmetic, i.e., how to prove the validity (and, in special cases, satisfiability) of first-order formulae that involve integer ...

Computer science literature abounds with descriptions of program verifiers, systems which analyse a software program and attempt to prove automatically that the program satisfies behavioural specifications. Techniques used include predicate abstraction, three-valued heaps graphs and classes of polyhedra. Yet while these systems have had some encouraging successes, each deals only with particula...

Unlike Hoare-style program verification, functional program verification supports forward reasoning by viewing a program as a mathematical function from one program state to another and proving its correctness by essentially comparing two mathematical functions, the function computed by the program and its specification. Since it requires a minimal mathematical background and reflects the way t...

When program verification fails, it is often hard to understand what went wrong in the absence of concrete executions that expose parts of the implementation or specification responsible for the failure. Automatic generation of such tests would require “executing” the complex specifications typically used for verification (with unbounded quantification and other expressive constructs), somethin...

The Program Development System (PDS) is a collection of programming tools created as an extension of the ECL programming system23. It contains components that assist the progr~r~er in the definition and modular structuring of large programs at different levels of algorithmic abstraction. These components are supplemented by a program analysis package that produces an information pool to be used...

Symbolic software verification engines such as Slam and ESC/Java often use automatic theorem provers to implement forms of symbolic simulation. The theorem provers that are used, such as Simplify, usually combine decision procedures for the theories of uninterpreted functions, linear arithmetic, and sometimes bit vectors using techniques proposed by Nelson-Oppen or Shostak. Programming language...

A N D R E A A S P E R T I, H E R M A N G E U V E R S and R A J A N A T A R A J A N 1 Dept. of Comp. Sci., Univ. of Bologna, Mura Anteo Zamboni 7, 40127 Bologna, Italy Email: [email protected] 2 Dept. of Comp. Sci., Radboud Univ. Nijmegen and Tech. Univ. Eindhoven, The Netherlands Email: [email protected] 3 School of Tech. & Comp. Sci., Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai 400 005, Ind...

We present a Prolog program (the SAT solver of Howe and King) as a logic program with added control. The control consists of a selection rule (delays of Prolog) and pruning the search space. We construct the logic program together with proofs of its correctness and completeness, with respect to a formal specification. This is augmented by a proof of termination under any selection rule. Correct...

Verification activities mandated for critical software are essential to achieve the required level of confidence expected in life-critical or business-critical software. They are becoming increasingly costly as, over time, they require the development and maintenance of a large body of functional and robustness tests on larger and more complex applications. Formal program verification offers a ...

Most temporal logics which have been introduced and studied in the past decades can be embedded into the modal Lμ. This is the case for e.g. PDL, CTL, CTL , ECTL, LTL, etc. and entails that these logics cannot express non-regular program properties. In recent years, some novel approaches towards an increase in expressive power have been made: Fixpoint Logic with Chop enriches Lμ with a sequenti...