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Constrained Horn Clauses (CHCs) have conventionally been used as a low-level representation in formal verification. Most existing solvers use a diverse set of specialized techniques, including direct state space traversal or…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2024-04-24 Márk Somorjai , Mihály Dobos-Kovács , Zsófia Ádám , Levente Bajczi , András Vörös

Relational verification is a technique that aims at proving properties that relate two different program fragments, or two different program runs. It has been shown that constrained Horn clauses (CHCs) can effectively be used for relational…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2017-09-15 Emanuele De Angelis , Fabio Fioravanti , Alberto Pettorossi , Maurizio Proietti

Programs that manipulate tree-shaped data structures often require complex, specialized proofs that are difficult to generalize and automate. This paper introduces a unified, foundational approach to verifying such programs. Central to our…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2025-05-21 Marco Faella , Gennaro Parlato

In this paper, we show how the notion of tree dimension can be used in the verification of constrained Horn clauses (CHCs). The dimension of a tree is a numerical measure of its branching complexity and the concept here applies to Horn…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2018-03-07 Bishoksan Kafle , John P. Gallagher , Pierre Ganty

We present a method for automatic inference of conditions on the initial states of a program that guarantee that the safety assertions in the program are not violated. Constrained Horn clauses (CHCs) are used to model the program and…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2018-04-18 Bishoksan Kafle , John P. Gallagher , Graeme Gange , Peter Schachte , Harald Sondergaard , Peter J. Stuckey

Reduction to the satisfiability problem for constrained Horn clauses (CHCs) is a widely studied approach to automated program verification. The current CHC-based methods for pointer-manipulating programs, however, are not very scalable.…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2020-06-12 Yusuke Matsushita , Takeshi Tsukada , Naoki Kobayashi

Higher-order constrained Horn clauses (HoCHC) are a semantically-invariant system of higher-order logic modulo theories. With semi-decidable unsolvability over a semi-decidable background theory, HoCHC is suitable for safety verification.…

Formal Languages and Automata Theory · Computer Science 2021-09-13 Jerome Jochems

First-order logic is a natural way of expressing the properties of computation, traditionally used in various program logics for expressing the correctness properties and certificates. Subsequently, modern methods in the automated inference…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2021-11-02 Yurii Kostyukov , Dmitry Mordvinov , Grigory Fedyukovich

In recent years they have been numerous works that aim to automate relational verification. Meanwhile, although Constrained Horn Clauses (CHCs) empower a wide range of verification techniques and tools, they lack the ability to express…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2021-06-07 Hiroshi Unno , Tachio Terauchi , Eric Koskinen

We present Ultimate TreeAutomizer, a solver for satisfiability of sets of constrained Horn clauses. Constrained Horn clauses (CHC) are a fragment of first order logic with attractive properties in terms of expressiveness and accessibility…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2019-07-10 Daniel Dietsch , Matthias Heizmann , Jochen Hoenicke , Alexander Nutz , Andreas Podelski

The functional properties of a program are often specified by providing a contract for each of its functions. A contract of a function consists of a pair of formulas, called a precondition and a postcondition, which, respectively, should…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2022-11-23 Emanuele De Angelis , Fabio Fioravanti , Alberto Pettorossi , Maurizio Proietti

We present an approach to constrained Horn clause (CHC) verification combining three techniques: abstract interpretation over a domain of convex polyhedra, specialisation of the constraints in CHCs using abstract interpretation of…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2014-12-04 Bishoksan Kafle , John P. Gallagher

This paper tackles the problem of the existence of solutions for recursive systems of Horn clauses with second-order variables interpreted as integer relations, and harnessed by quantifier-free difference bounds arithmetic. We start by…

Formal Languages and Automata Theory · Computer Science 2016-02-16 Radu Iosif

Motivated by applications in automated verification of higher-order functional programs, we develop a notion of constrained Horn clauses in higher-order logic and a decision problem concerning their satisfiability. We show that, although…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2017-08-02 Toby Cathcart Burn , C. -H. Luke Ong , Steven J. Ramsay

Answer-set programming (ASP) has emerged recently as a viable programming paradigm. We describe here an ASP system, DATALOG with constraints or DC, based on non-monotonic logic. Informally, DC theories consist of propositional clauses…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2007-05-23 Deborah East , Miroslaw Truszczynski

Recursion-free Constrained Horn Clauses (CHCs) are logic-programming problems that can model safety properties of programs with bounded iteration and recursion. In addition, many CHC solvers reduce recursive systems to a series of…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2018-09-18 Qi Zhou , David Heath , William Harris

Constrained Horn Clauses (CHCs) are widely adopted as intermediate representations for a variety of verification tasks, including safety checking, invariant synthesis, and interprocedural analysis. This paper introduces CHCVERIF, a…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-10-31 Mihály Dobos-Kovács , Levente Bajczi , András Vörös

Verification conditions (VCs) are logical formulas whose satisfiability guarantees program correctness. We consider VCs in the form of constrained Horn clauses (CHC) which are automatically generated from the encoding of (an interpreter of)…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2016-07-18 Emanuele De Angelis , Fabio Fioravanti , Alberto Pettorossi , Maurizio Proietti

In this paper we show that checking satisfiability of a set of non-linear Horn clauses (also called a non-linear Horn clause program) can be achieved using a solver for linear Horn clauses. We achieve this by interleaving a program…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2016-07-18 Bishoksan Kafle , John P. Gallagher , Pierre Ganty

Despite the recent progress of automated program verification techniques, fully automated verification of programs manipulating recursive data structures remains a challenge. We introduce solvable tuple patterns (STPs) and conjunctive STPs…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Naoki Kobayashi , Ryosuke Sato , Ayumi Shinohara , Ryo Yoshinaka