Acta Informatica

Acta Informatica provides international dissemination of articles on formal methods for the design and analysis of programs, computing systems and information ...

List of Papers (Total 114)

Synthesis from hyperproperties

We study the reactive synthesis problem for hyperproperties given as formulas of the temporal logic HyperLTL. Hyperproperties generalize trace properties, i.e., sets of traces, to sets of sets of traces. Typical examples are information-flow policies like noninterference, which stipulate that no sensitive data must leak into the public domain. Such properties cannot be expressed...

Automated formal synthesis of provably safe digital controllers for continuous plants

We present a sound and automated approach to synthesizing safe, digital controllers for physical plants represented as time-invariant models. Models are linear differential equations with inputs, evolving over a continuous state space. The synthesis precisely accounts for the effects of finite-precision arithmetic introduced by the controller. The approach uses counterexample...

Performance heuristics for GR(1) synthesis and related algorithms

Reactive synthesis for the GR(1) fragment of LTL has been implemented and studied in many works. In this work we present and evaluate a list of heuristics to potentially reduce running times for GR(1) synthesis and related algorithms. The list includes several heuristics for controlled predecessor computation and BDDs, early detection of fixed-points and unrealizability, fixed...

Congruence from the operator’s point of view

A basic sanity property of a process semantics is that it constitutes a congruence with respect to standard process operators. This issue has been traditionally addressed by developing, for a specific process semantics, a syntactic format for operational semantics specifications. We suggest a novel, orthogonal approach, which focuses on a specific process operator and determines...

Synthesizing optimally resilient controllers

Recently, Dallal, Neider, and Tabuada studied a generalization of the classical game-theoretic model used in program synthesis, which additionally accounts for unmodeled intermittent disturbances. In this extended framework, one is interested in computing optimally resilient strategies, i.e., strategies that are resilient against as many disturbances as possible. Dallal, Neider...

Distributive laws for monotone specifications

Turi and Plotkin introduced an elegant approach to structural operational semantics based on universal coalgebra, parametric in the type of syntax and the type of behaviour. Their framework includes abstract GSOS, a categorical generalisation of the classical GSOS rule format, as well as its categorical dual, coGSOS. Both formats are well behaved, in the sense that each...

Symbolic checking of Fuzzy CTL on Fuzzy Program Graph

Few fuzzy temporal logics and modeling formalisms are developed such that their model checking is both effective and efficient. State-space explosion makes model checking of fuzzy temporal logics inefficient. That is because either the modeling formalism itself is not compact, or the verification approach requires an exponentially larger yet intermediate representation of the...

Hierarchical information and the synthesis of distributed strategies

Infinite games with imperfect information are known to be undecidable unless the information flow is severely restricted. One fundamental decidable case occurs when there is a total ordering among players, such that each player has access to all the information that the following ones receive. In this paper we consider variations of this hierarchy principle for synchronous games...

Looking at mean payoff through foggy windows

Mean-payoff games (MPGs) are infinite duration two-player zero-sum games played on weighted graphs. Under the hypothesis of full observation, they admit memoryless optimal strategies for both players and can be solved in \({\mathsf {NP}}\cap {\mathsf {coNP}}\). MPGs are suitable quantitative models for open reactive systems. However, in this context the assumption of full...

Parity game reductions

Parity games play a central role in model checking and satisfiability checking. Solving parity games is computationally expensive, among others due to the size of the games, which, for model checking problems, can easily contain \(10^9\) vertices or beyond. Equivalence relations can be used to reduce the size of a parity game, thereby potentially alleviating part of the...

Approximate counting in SMT and value estimation for probabilistic programs

#SMT, or model counting for logical theories, is a well-known hard problem that generalizes such tasks as counting the number of satisfying assignments to a Boolean formula and computing the volume of a polytope. In the realm of satisfiability modulo theories (SMT) there is a growing need for model counting solvers, coming from several application domains (quantitative...

Characteristic bisimulation for higher-order session processes

For higher-order (process) languages, characterising contextual equivalence is a long-standing issue. In the setting of a higher-order \(\pi \)-calculus with session types, we develop characteristic bisimilarity, a typed bisimilarity which fully characterises contextual equivalence. To our knowledge, ours is the first characterisation of its kind. Using simple values inhabiting...

Reachability analysis of reversal-bounded automata on series–parallel graphs

Extensions to finite-state automata on strings, such as multi-head automata or multi-counter automata, have been successfully used to encode many infinite-state non-regular verification problems. In this paper, we consider a generalization of automata-theoretic infinite-state verification from strings to labelled series–parallel graphs. We define a model of non-deterministic, 2...

Dynamic Bayesian networks for formal verification of structured stochastic processes

We study the problem of finite-horizon probabilistic invariance for discrete-time Markov processes over general (uncountable) state spaces. We compute discrete-time, finite-state Markov chains as formal abstractions of the given Markov processes. Our abstraction differs from existing approaches in two ways: first, we exploit the structure of the underlying Markov process to...