Biblio

Formal verification of infinite-state systems, and distributed systems in particular, is a long standing research goal. In the deductive verification approach, the programmer provides inductive invariants and pre/post specifications of procedures, reducing the verification problem to checking validity of logical verification conditions. This check is often performed by automated theorem provers and SMT solvers, substantially increasing productivity in the verification of complex systems. However, the unpredictability of automated provers presents a major hurdle to usability of these tools. This problem is particularly acute in case of provers that handle undecidable logics, for example, first-order logic with quantifiers and theories such as arithmetic. The resulting extreme sensitivity to minor changes has a strong negative impact on the convergence of the overall proof effort.