Section: Research Program

Automated Reasoning

Permanent researchers: S. Conchon, G. Melquiond, A. Paskevich

Generalities on Automated Reasoning

• J. C. Blanchette and A. Paskevich have designed an extension to the TPTP TFF (Typed First-order Form) format of theorem proving problems to support rank-1 polymorphic types (also known as ML-style parametric polymorphism) [51]. This extension, named TFF1, has been incorporated in the TPTP standard.

• S. Conchon defended his habilitation à diriger des recherches in December 2012. The memoir [80] provides a useful survey of the scientific work of the past 10 years, around the SMT solving techniques, that led to the tools Alt-Ergo and Cubicle as they are nowadays.

Quantifiers and Triggers

• C. Dross, J. Kanig, S. Conchon, and A. Paskevich have proposed a generic framework for adding a decision procedure for a theory or a combination of theories to an SMT prover. This mechanism is based on the notion of instantiation patterns, or triggers, which restrict instantiation of universal premises and can effectively prevent a combinatorial explosion. A user provides an axiomatization with triggers, along with a proof of completeness and termination in the proposed framework, and obtains in return a sound, complete and terminating solver for his theory. A prototype implementation was realized on top of Alt-Ergo. As a case study, a feature-rich axiomatization of doubly-linked lists was proved complete and terminating [92]. C. Dross defended her PhD thesis in April 2014 [93]. The main results of the thesis are: (1) a formal semantics of the notion of triggers typically used to control quantifier instantiation in SMT solvers, (2) a general setting to show how a first-order axiomatization with triggers can be proved correct, complete, and terminating, and (3) an extended DPLL(T) algorithm to integrate a first-order axiomatization with triggers as a decision procedure for the theory it defines. Significant case studies were conducted on examples coming from SPARK programs, and on the benchmarks on B set theory constructed within the BWare project.

Reasoning Modulo Theories

• S. Conchon, É. Contejean and M. Iguernelala have presented a modular extension of ground AC-completion for deciding formulas in the combination of the theory of equality with user-defined AC symbols, uninterpreted symbols and an arbitrary signature-disjoint Shostak theory X [82]. This work extends the results presented in [81] by showing that a simple preprocessing step allows to get rid of a full AC-compatible reduction ordering, and to simply use a partial multiset extension of a non-necessarily AC-compatible ordering.

• S. Conchon, M. Iguernelala, and A. Mebsout have designed a collaborative framework for reasoning modulo simple properties of non-linear arithmetic [86]. This framework has been implemented in the Alt-Ergo SMT solver.

• S. Conchon, G. Melquiond and C. Roux have described a dedicated procedure for a theory of floating-point numbers which allows reasoning on approximation errors. This procedure is based on the approach of the Gappa tool: it performs saturation of consequences of the axioms, in order to refine bounds on expressions. In addition to the original approach, bounds are further refined by a constraint solver for linear arithmetic [88]. This procedure has been implemented in Alt-Ergo.

• In collaboration with A. Mahboubi (Inria project-team Typical), and G. Melquiond, the group involved in the development of Alt-Ergo have implemented and proved the correctness of a novel decision procedure for quantifier-free linear integer arithmetic [1]. This algorithm tries to bridge the gap between projection and branching/cutting methods: it interleaves an exhaustive search for a model with bounds inference. These bounds are computed provided an oracle capable of finding constant positive linear combinations of affine forms. An efficient oracle based on the Simplex procedure has been designed. This algorithm is proved sound, complete, and terminating and is implemented in Alt-Ergo.

• Most of the results above are detailed in M. Iguernelala's PhD thesis [103].

Applications

• We have been quite successful in the application of Alt-Ergo to industrial development: qualification by Airbus France, integration of Alt-Ergo into the Spark Pro toolset.

• In the context of the BWare project, aiming at using Why3 and Alt-Ergo for discharging proof obligations generated by Atelier B, we made progress into several directions. The method of translation of B proof obligations into Why3 goals was first presented at ABZ'2012 [119]. Then, new drivers have been designed for Why3, in order to use new back-end provers Zenon modulo and iProver modulo. A notion of rewrite rule was introduced into Why3, and a transformation for simplifying goals before sending them to back-end provers was designed. Intermediate results obtained so far in the project were presented both at the French conference AFADL [91] and at ABZ'2014 [90].

  On the side of Alt-Ergo, recent developments have been made to efficiently discharge proof obligations generated by Atelier B. This includes a new plugin architecture to facilitate experiments with different SAT engines, new heuristics to handle quantified formulas, and important modifications in its internal data structures to boost performances of core decision procedures. Benchmarks realized on more than 10,000 proof obligations generated from industrial B projects show significant improvements [85].

• Hybrid automatons interleave continuous behaviors (described by differential equations) with discrete transitions. D. Ishii and G. Melquiond have worked on an automated procedure for verifying safety properties (that is, global invariants) of such systems [104].

Project-team Positioning

Automated Theorem Proving is a large community, but several sub-groups can be identified:

• The SMT-LIB community gathers people interested in reasoning modulo theories. In this community, only a minority of participants are interested in supporting first-order quantifiers at the same time as theories. SMT solvers that support quantifiers are Z3 (Microsoft Research Redmond, USA), CVC3 and its successor CVC4 (http://cvc4.cs.nyu.edu/web/).

• The TPTP community gathers people interested in first-order theorem proving.

• Other Inria teams develop provers: veriT by team Veridis, and Psyche by team Parsifal.

• Other groups develop provers dedicated to very specific cases, such as Metitarski (http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~lp15/papers/Arith/) at Cambridge, UK, which aims at proving formulas on real numbers, in particular involving special functions such as log or exp. The goal is somewhat similar to our CoqInterval library, cf objective 4.

It should be noticed that a large number of provers mentioned above are connected to Why3 as back-ends.