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Section: Contracts and Grants with Industry

ANR PiCoq project

Participant : Alan Schmitt.

The goal of the PiCoq project is to develop an environment for the formal verification of properties of distributed, component-based programs. The project's approach approach lies at the interface between two research areas: concurrency theory and proof assistants. Achieving this goal relies on three scientific advances, which the project intends to address:

  • Finding mathematical frameworks that ease modular reasoning about concurrent and distributed systems: due to their large size and complex interactions, distributed systems cannot be analysed in a global way. They have to be decomposed into modular components, whose individual behaviour can be understood.

  • Improving existing proof techniques for distributed/modular systems: while behavioural theories of first-order concurrent languages are well understood, this is not the case for higher-order ones. We also need to generalise well-known modular techniques that have been developed for first-order languages to facilitate formalisation in a proof assistant, where source code redundancies should be avoided.

  • Defining core calculi that both reflect concrete practice in distributed component programming and enjoy nice properties w.r.t. behavioural equivalences.

The project partners include INRIA, LIP, and Université de Savoie. The project runs from November 2010 to October 2014.