Automatic Generation of Invariants

  • Authors:
  • Saddek Bensalem;Yassine Lakhnech

  • Affiliations:
  • VERIMAG, Centre Equation 2, avenue de Vignate, F-38610 Gières, France. Saddek.Bensalem@imag.fr;Institut für Informatik und Praktische Mathematik, Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel, Preußerstr, 1-9, D-24105 Kiel, Germany. yl@informatik.uni-kiel.de

  • Venue:
  • Formal Methods in System Design - Special issue on The First Federated Logic Conference (FLOC'96), part II
  • Year:
  • 1999

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Abstract

When proving invariance properties of programs, one is faced with twoproblems. The first problem is related to the necessity of proving tautologiesof the considered assertion language, whereas the second manifestsitself in the need of finding sufficiently strong invariants. This paper focuseson the second problem and describes techniques for the automatic generation ofinvariants. The first set of these techniques is applicable to sequentialtransition systems and allows deriving so-called local invariants,i.e., predicates which are invariant at some control location. The second isapplicable on networks of transition systems and allows combining localinvariants of the sequential components to obtain local invariants of the global system.