Re-uniting automatic theorem proving and logic programming for the formal verification of logic languages

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Project objective

The aim of this project is to design a system for the mechanised formal verification of logic programs. We intend that the system will be based on both Automated Theorem Proving and Logic Programming, and we will construct a prototype demonstrator in order to provide a test-bed for our ideas. The focus of our theoretical work will be on finding out some appropriate extensions of the interpreter of the logic programming language under consideration, making it able to prove properties of programs, expressed as logical formulas. Since reasoning about specification formulas requires induction, the interest will be centered on how to provide a resolution-based theorem prover with the power of induction. The novelty of the project is that systems that allow for reasoning using both resolution and induction have been not yet designed. We plan to evaluate two possible approaches for the design of our system, and to choose one of them as a basis for our implementation. The first is to use a logic programming language based on a higher order logic for specifying and implementing a system for program verification, exploiting the operations of search and unification which are built into such a language. Such a system would not suffer from the problem with the infinite paths generated by the inductive definitions of the programs. Alternatively, staying within the realm of first of order logic, we can use loop detector tools for getting the effect of induction. The resulting system will be an extension of the interpreter for the logic programming language. We believe that this approach is smoothly generalized to the well-known extensions of the classical LP, such as constraint logic programming and concurrent constraint programming. We plan to start the research work with some theoretical studies aimed at establishing solid mathematical foundations for the construction of our verifier of logic programs. We intend to construct a prototype of such a verifier as a completely automated system able to solve a wide range of real-life problems.

Original text from CORDIS.

Participants

• CITY UNIVERSITY · LONDONCoordinatorUnited Kingdom
• Not availableCity levelItaly

Links

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