Proving Liveness of Parameterized Programs

• Published in: Proceedings of the 31st Annual ACM/IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science pp. 185 - 196
• Main Authors: Farzan, Azadeh, Kincaid, Zachary, Podelski, Andreas
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: New York, NY, USA ACM 05.07.2016
• Series: ACM Conferences
• Subjects: General and reference; General and reference > Cross-computing tools and techniques; General and reference > Cross-computing tools and techniques > Verification; Software and its engineering; Software and its engineering > Software creation and management; Software and its engineering > Software creation and management > Software development process management; Software and its engineering > Software creation and management > Software verification and validation; Software and its engineering > Software creation and management > Software verification and validation > Formal software verification; Software and its engineering > Software organization and properties; Software and its engineering > Software organization and properties > Software functional properties; Software and its engineering > Software organization and properties > Software functional properties > Formal methods; Software and its engineering > Software organization and properties > Software functional properties > Formal methods > Software verification; Theory of computation; Theory of computation > Logic; Theory of computation > Logic > Proof theory; Theory of computation > Semantics and reasoning; Theory of computation > Semantics and reasoning > Program reasoning; Theory of computation > Semantics and reasoning > Program reasoning > Program verification
• ISBN: 9781450343916; 1450343910
• DOI: 10.1145/2933575.2935310

Correctness of multi-threaded programs typically requires that they satisfy liveness properties. For example, a program may require that no thread is starved of a shared resource, or that all threads eventually agree on a single value. This paper presents a method for proving that such liveness properties hold. Two particular challenges which are addressed in this work are that (1) the correctness argument may rely on global behaviour of the system (e.g., the correctness argument may require that all threads collectively progress towards "the good thing" rather than one thread progressing while the others do not interfere), and (2) such programs are often designed to be executed by any number of threads, and the desired liveness properties must hold no matter how many threads are active in the system.