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Automating Event-B invariant proofs by rippling and proof patching

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Date
02/2019
Author
Lin, Yuhui
Bundy, Alan
Grov, Gudmund
Maclean, Ewen
Keywords
Formal verification
Event-B
Automated reasoning
Rippling
Lemma conjecturing
QA75 Electronic computers. Computer science
T-NDAS
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Abstract
The use of formal method techniques can contribute to the production of more reliable and dependable systems. However, a common bottleneck for industrial adoption of such techniques is the needs for interactive proofs. We use a popular formal method, called Event-B, as our working domain, and set invariant preservation (INV) proofs as targets, because INV proofs can account for a significant proportion of the proofs requiring human interactions. We apply an inductive theorem proving technique, called rippling, for Event-B INV proofs. Rippling automates proofs using meta-level guidance. The guidance is in particular useful to develop proof patches to recover failed proof attempts. We are interested in the case when a missing lemma is required. We combine a scheme-based theory-exploration system, called IsaScheme [MRMDB10], with rippling to develop a proof patch via lemma discovery. We also develop two new proof patches to unfold operator definitions and to suggest case-splits, respectively. The combined use of rippling with these three proof patches as a proof method significantly improves the proof automation for our evaluation set.
Citation
Lin , Y , Bundy , A , Grov , G & Maclean , E 2019 , ' Automating Event-B invariant proofs by rippling and proof patching ' , Formal Aspects of Computing , vol. 31 , no. 1 , pp. 95-129 . https://doi.org/10.1007/s00165-018-00476-7
Publication
Formal Aspects of Computing
Status
Peer reviewed
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s00165-018-00476-7
ISSN
0934-5043
Type
Journal article
Rights
© The Author(s) 2018. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.
Description
This work is supported by EPSRC grants EP/H024204/1, EP/E005713/1, EP/M018407/1 and EP/J001058/1.
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  • University of St Andrews Research
URI
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/16838

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