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This paper introduces a uniform substitution calculus for $\mathsf{dL}_\text{CHP}$, the dynamic logic of communicating hybrid programs. Uniform substitution enables parsimonious prover kernels by using axioms instead of axiom schemata. Instantiations can be recovered from a single proof rule responsible for soundness-critical instantiation checks rather than being spread across axiom schemata in side conditions. Even though communication and parallelism reasoning are notorious for necessitating subtle soundness-critical side conditions, uniform substitution when generalized to $\mathsf{dL}_\text{CHP}$ manages to limit and isolate their conceptual overhead. Since uniform substitution has proven to simplify the implementation of hybrid systems provers substantially, uniform substitution for $\mathsf{dL}_\text{CHP}$ paves the way for a parsimonious implementation of theorem provers for hybrid systems with communication and parallelism., Comment: CADE 2023 more...

Invariant sets are a key ingredient for verifying safety and other properties of cyber-physical systems that mix discrete and continuous dynamics. We adapt the elimination-theoretic Rosenfeld-Gr\"{o}bner algorithm to systematically obtain algebraic invariants of polynomial dynamical systems without using Gr\"{o}bner bases or quantifier elimination. We identify totally real varieties as an important class for efficient invariance checking. more...

We propose a new approach to automated theorem proving where an AlphaZero-style agent is self-training to refine a generic high-level expert strategy expressed as a nondeterministic program. An analogous teacher agent is self-training to generate tasks of suitable relevance and difficulty for the learner. This allows leveraging minimal amounts of domain knowledge to tackle problems for which training data is unavailable or hard to synthesize. As a specific illustration, we consider loop invariant synthesis for imperative programs and use neural networks to refine both the teacher and solver strategies. more...

This paper presents a formally verified quantifier elimination (QE) algorithm for first-order real arithmetic by linear and quadratic virtual substitution (VS) in Isabelle/HOL. The Tarski-Seidenberg theorem established that the first-order logic of real arithmetic is decidable by QE. However, in practice, QE algorithms are highly complicated and often combine multiple methods for performance. VS is a practically successful method for QE that targets formulas with low-degree polynomials. To our knowledge, this is the first work to formalize VS for quadratic real arithmetic including inequalities. The proofs necessitate various contributions to the existing multivariate polynomial libraries in Isabelle/HOL. Our framework is modularized and easily expandable (to facilitate integrating future optimizations), and could serve as a basis for developing practical general-purpose QE algorithms. Further, as our formalization is designed with practicality in mind, we export our development to SML and test the resulting code on 378 benchmarks from the literature, comparing to Redlog, Z3, Wolfram Engine, and SMT-RAT. This identified inconsistencies in some tools, underscoring the significance of a verified approach for the intricacies of real arithmetic., Comment: FM 2021 more...

Stability is required for real world controlled systems as it ensures that those systems can tolerate small, real world perturbations around their desired operating states. This paper shows how stability for continuous systems modeled by ordinary differential equations (ODEs) can be formally verified in differential dynamic logic (dL). The key insight is to specify ODE stability by suitably nesting the dynamic modalities of dL with first-order logic quantifiers. Elucidating the logical structure of stability properties in this way has three key benefits: i) it provides a flexible means of formally specifying various stability properties of interest, ii) it yields rigorous proofs of those stability properties from dL's axioms with dL's ODE safety and liveness proof principles, and iii) it enables formal analysis of the relationships between various stability properties which, in turn, inform proofs of those properties. These benefits are put into practice through an implementation of stability proofs for several examples in KeYmaera X, a hybrid systems theorem prover based on dL., Comment: Long version of paper at TACAS 2021 (27th International Conference on Tools and Algorithms for the Construction and Analysis of Systems, 27 Mar - 1 Apr 2021) more...

Hybrid games are models which combine discrete, continuous, and adversarial dynamics. Game logic enables proving (classical) existence of winning strategies. We introduce constructive differential game logic (CdGL) for hybrid games, where proofs that a player can win the game correspond to computable winning strategies. This is the logical foundation for synthesis of correct control and monitoring code for safety-critical cyber-physical systems. Our contributions include novel static and dynamic semantics as well as soundness and consistency., Comment: 60 pages, preprint, under review more...

Game Logic is an excellent setting to study proofs-about-programs via the interpretation of those proofs as programs, because constructive proofs for games correspond to effective winning strategies to follow in response to the opponent's actions. We thus develop Constructive Game Logic which extends Parikh's Game Logic (GL) with constructivity and with first-order programs a la Pratt's first-order dynamic logic (DL). Our major contributions include: 1) a novel realizability semantics capturing the adversarial dynamics of games, 2) a natural deduction calculus and operational semantics describing the computational meaning of strategies via proof-terms, and 3) theoretical results including soundness of the proof calculus w.r.t. realizability semantics, progress and preservation of the operational semantics of proofs, and Existence Properties on support of the extraction of computational artifacts from game proofs. Together, these results provide the most general account of a Curry-Howard interpretation for any program logic to date, and the first at all for Game Logic., Comment: 74 pages, extended preprint for ESOP more...

We present Kaisar, a structured interactive proof language for differential dynamic logic (dL), for safety-critical cyber-physical systems (CPS). The defining feature of Kaisar is *nominal terms*, which simplify CPS proofs by making the frequently needed historical references to past program states first-class. To support nominals, we extend the notion of structured proof with a first-class notion of *structured symbolic execution* of CPS models. We implement Kaisar in the theorem prover KeYmaera X and reproduce an example on the safe operation of a parachute and a case study on ground robot control. We show how nominals simplify common CPS reasoning tasks when combined with other features of structured proof. We develop an extensive metatheory for Kaisar. In addition to soundness and completeness, we show a formal specification for Kaisar's nominals and relate Kaisar to a nominal variant of dL. more...

This paper presents an approach for deductive liveness verification for ordinary differential equations (ODEs) with differential dynamic logic. Numerous subtleties complicate the generalization of well-known discrete liveness verification techniques, such as loop variants, to the continuous setting. For example, ODE solutions may blow up in finite time or their progress towards the goal may converge to zero. Our approach handles these subtleties by successively refining ODE liveness properties using ODE invariance properties which have a well-understood deductive proof theory. This approach is widely applicable: we survey several liveness arguments in the literature and derive them all as special instances of our axiomatic refinement approach. We also correct several soundness errors in the surveyed arguments, which further highlights the subtlety of ODE liveness reasoning and the utility of our deductive approach. The library of common refinement steps identified through our approach enables both the sound development and justification of new ODE liveness proof rules from our axioms., Comment: FM 2019: 23rd International Symposium on Formal Methods, Porto, Portugal, October 9-11, 2019 more...

Formal verification provides strong safety guarantees but only for models of cyber-physical systems. Hybrid system models describe the required interplay of computation and physical dynamics, which is crucial to guarantee what computations lead to safe physical behavior (e.g., cars should not collide). Control computations that affect physical dynamics must act in advance to avoid possibly unsafe future circumstances. Formal verification then ensures that the controllers correctly identify and provably avoid unsafe future situations under a certain model of physics. But any model of physics necessarily deviates from reality and, moreover, any observation with real sensors and manipulation with real actuators is subject to uncertainty. This makes runtime validation a crucial step to monitor whether the model assumptions hold for the real system implementation. The key question is what property needs to be runtime-monitored and what a satisfied runtime monitor entails about the safety of the system: the observations of a runtime monitor only relate back to the safety of the system if they are themselves accompanied by a proof of correctness! For an unbroken chain of correctness guarantees, we, thus, synthesize runtime monitors in a provably correct way from provably safe hybrid system models. This paper addresses the inevitable challenge of making the synthesized monitoring conditions robust to partial observability of sensor uncertainty and partial controllability due to actuator disturbance. We show that the monitoring conditions result in provable safety guarantees with fallback controllers that react to monitor violation at runtime. more...

We survey dynamic logics for specifying and verifying properties of dynamical systems, including hybrid systems, distributed hybrid systems, and stochastic hybrid systems. A dynamic logic is a first-order modal logic with a pair of parametrized modal operators for each dynamical system to express necessary or possible properties of their transition behavior. Due to their full basis of first-order modal logic operators, dynamic logics can express a rich variety of system properties, including safety, controllability, reactivity, liveness, and quantified parametrized properties, even about relations between multiple dynamical systems. In this survey, we focus on some of the representatives of the family of differential dynamic logics, which share the ability to express properties of dynamical systems having continuous dynamics described by various forms of differential equations. We explain the dynamical system models, dynamic logics of dynamical systems, their semantics, their axiomatizations, and proof calculi for proving logical formulas about these dynamical systems. We study differential invariants, i.e., induction principles for differential equations. We survey theoretical results, including soundness and completeness and deductive power. Differential dynamic logics have been implemented in automatic and interactive theorem provers and have been used successfully to verify safety-critical applications in automotive, aviation, railway, robotics, and analogue electrical circuits., Comment: Long version of LICS'12 invited tutorial DOI 10.1109/LICS.2012.13 more...