Related papers: Structural Abstraction and Selective Refinement fo…

The emergent behaviour of autonomous robotic swarms poses a significant challenge to their safety assurance. Assurance tasks encompass adherence to standards, certification processes, and the execution of verification and validation (V&V)…

Refinement transforms an abstract system model into a concrete, executable program, such that properties established for the abstract model carry over to the concrete implementation. Refinement has been used successfully in the development…

Carrying Code (ACC) has recently been proposed as a framework for mobile code safety in which the code supplier provides a program together with an abstraction (or abstract model of the program) whose validity entails compliance with a…

Verification of concurrent systems with thousands of multiple threads and transactions is a challenging problem not just for simulation or emulation but also for formal. To get designs to work correctly and provide optimal PPA the designers…

Deductive verification of concurrent programs under weak memory has thus far been limited to simple programs over a monolithic state space. For scalabiility, we also require modular techniques with verifiable library abstractions. This…

This article introduces a fully automated verification technique that permits to analyze real-time systems described using a continuous notion of time and a mixture of operational (i.e., automata-based) and descriptive (i.e., logic-based)…

We review state-of-the-art formal methods applied to the emerging field of the verification of machine learning systems. Formal methods can provide rigorous correctness guarantees on hardware and software systems. Thanks to the availability…

Multi-robot path planning is difficult due to the combinatorial explosion of the search space with every new robot added. Complete search of the combined state-space soon becomes intractable. In this paper we present a novel form of…

In this paper, we enable automated property verification of deliberative components in robot control architectures. We focus on formalizing the execution context of Behavior Trees (BTs) to provide a scalable, yet formally grounded,…

Refinement based formal methods allow the modelling of systems through incremental steps via abstraction. Discovering the right levels of abstraction, formulating correct and meaningful invariants, and analysing faulty models are some of…

Software engineering of modular robotic systems is a challenging task, however, verifying that the developed components all behave as they should individually and as a whole presents its own unique set of challenges. In particular, distinct…

Model checking of multi-agent systems (MAS) is known to be hard, both theoretically and in practice. A smart abstraction of the state space may significantly reduce the model, and facilitate the verification. In this paper, we propose and…

Software is now ubiquitous and involved in complex interactions with the human users and the physical world in so-called cyber-physical systems where the management of time is a major issue. Separation of concerns is a key asset in the…

As hardware and software systems have grown in complexity, formal methods have been indispensable tools for rigorously specifying acceptable behaviors, synthesizing programs to meet these specifications, and validating the correctness of…

We apply a compositional formal modeling and verification method to an autonomous aircraft taxi system. We provide insights into the modeling approach and we identify several research areas where further development is needed. Specifically,…

The study of causal abstractions bridges two integral components of human intelligence: the ability to determine cause and effect, and the ability to interpret complex patterns into abstract concepts. Formally, causal abstraction frameworks…

Traditional methods for formal verification (FV) of deep neural networks (DNNs) are constrained by a binary encoding of safety properties, where a model is classified as either safe or unsafe (robust or not robust). This binary encoding…

With the increasing integration of neural networks as components in mission-critical systems, there is an increasing need to ensure that they satisfy various safety and liveness requirements. In recent years, numerous sound and complete…

Seamless model based development aims to use models during all phases of the development process of a system. During the development process in a component-based approach, components of a system are described at qualitatively differing…

Uniform coloured Petri nets can be abstracted to their skeleton, the place/transition net that simply turns the coloured tokens into black tokens. A coloured net and its skeleton are related by a net morphism. For the application of the…