Compositional Verification in Rewriting Logic

TL;DR

This paper extends rewriting logic with compositional verification techniques, enabling modular system analysis through assume/guarantee reasoning, simulation, and abstraction, while maintaining distributed and global system views.

Contribution

It introduces a framework for compositional verification in rewriting logic, including assume/guarantee reasoning, simulation, and abstraction, with equivalence of distributed and global system perspectives.

Findings

Assume/guarantee reasoning adapted to rewriting logic.

Componentwise simulation and abstraction methods.

Equivalence of distributed and global system views.

Abstract

In previous work, summarized in this paper, we proposed an operation of parallel composition for rewriting-logic theories, allowing compositional specification of systems and reusability of components. The present paper focuses on compositional verification. We show how the assume/guarantee technique can be transposed to our setting, by giving appropriate definitions of satisfaction based on transition structures and path semantics. We also show that simulation and equational abstraction can be done componentwise. Appropriate concepts of fairness and deadlock for our composition operation are discussed, as they affect satisfaction of temporal formulas. We keep in parallel a distributed and a global view of composed systems. We show that these views are equivalent and interchangeable, which may help our intuition and also has practical uses as, for example, it allows global-style verification of a modularly specified system.