Formal verification of concurrent programs

Abstract

Interactive theorem proving provides a general approach to modeling and verification of both finite-state and infinite-state systems but requires significant human efforts to deal with many tedious proofs. On the other hand, model-checking is limited to some application domain with small finite-state space. A natural thought for this problem is to integrate these two approaches. To keep the consistency of the integration and ensure the correctness of verification, we suggest to use type theory based theorem provers (e.g. Lego) as the platform for the integration and build a model-checker to do parts of the verification automatically. We formalise a verification system of both CCS and an imperative language in the proof development system Lego which can be used to verify both finite-state and infinite-state problems. Then a model-checker, LegoMC, is implemented to generate Lego proof terras for finite-state problems automatically. Therefore people can use Lego to verify a general problem with some of its finite sub-problems verified by LegoMC. On the other hand, this integration extends the power of model-checking to verify more complicated and infinite-state models as well. The development of automatic techniques and the integration of different reasoning methods would directly benefit the verification community. It is expected that further extension and development of this verification environment would be able to handle real life systems. On the other hand, the research gives us some experiences about how to automate proofs in interactive theorem provers and therefore will improve the usability and applicability of the theorem proving technology.