Projects for ComS 512

Following are some sample projects. You can select from the following or you can also decide on work on projects of your choice (preferred choice: come up with projects from your research area). In either case, you must talk to me before finalizing.

We will have two types of projects: (a) development of practical tools based on formal methods in some application domain; (b) comprehensive survey of formal method techniques.

• Multiprocess counterexample analysis. In the event a property is not satisfied by the model, the model checker generates a counterexample which is a trace (if the property is universal path property) in the model witnessing the violation. Typically, such counterexamples are very long and it is extremely difficult to understand the cause of counterexample; causal analysis is important if you want to debug your model quickly.

  We will examine models that are made of multiple processes/threads (simple example: mutual exclusion protocol is for multi-threaded systems) and properties that are universal path properties. Cause of counterexamples in such cases can be attributed to some specific interleavings of the processes/threads. The goal is to identify such interleavings and guide the user to take appropriate corrective measure (possibly by updating the model and inserting atomic operations to remove the interleavings).

  The work will involve understanding the working of SMV/Spin model checker. You can look at the following papers (not a comprehensive list) to get better understanding of the above project.

  • Understanding counter-examples with Explain: Groce, Kroening and Lerda
  • Explaining abstract counter-examples: Chaki, Groce and Strichman
  • From Symptom to Cause: Localizing Errors in Counterexample Traces : Ball, Naik and Rajamani
• Survey projects. I have listed some of the topics for survey projects (you can also come up with topics). The papers listed for each topic are just few representative publications; it is not a complete list. You are required to have in-depth knowledge of selected topics and should be able to answer any question related to them. If any of the link is broken, first Google-search; most of these papers are available at the author Websites or citeseer.
  • Parameterized System Verification
  • Symbolic model checking with rich assertional languages: Kesten, Maler, Marcus, Pnueli and Shahar
  • Parameterized verification with automatically computed inductive assertions: Arons, Pnueli, Ruah, Xu, Zuck
  • Liveness with Invisible Ranking: Fang, Piterman, Pnueli and Zuck
  • Parameterized Verification by Probabilistic Abstraction: Arons, Pnueli and Zuck
  • Parameterized Model Checking of Ring-Based Message Passing Systems: Emerson and Kahlon
  Look for conferences like CAV, TACAS in the recent years to dig up recent papers on the above topic.
  • Verification of Programs: Bhagvan, Jillella
  • Efficient algorithms for model checking push-down systems: Esparza, Hansel, Rossmanith and Schwoon
  • A BDD-based model checker for recursive programs: Esparza and Schwoon
  • Extended weighted pushdown systems: Lal, Reps and Balakrishnan
  • Model checking guided abstraction and analysis: Saidi
  • Syntactic program transformations for automatic abstraction: Namjoshi and Kurshan
  • Lazy abstraction: Henzinger, Jhala, Majumdar and Sutre
  Look at SLAM (Microsoft), DART (UIUC, directed automated random testing), CUTE (Concolic unit testing), BLAST (Berkeley Lazy Abstraction) projects for more papers.
  
  
  • Probabilistic Model Checking
  Some papers on Probabilistic Model Checking