Formal Methods for Specifying Systems (DAT912)

The course covers advanced topics in formal methods for specifying system designs, model checking, and proving safety and liveness properties.


Course description for study year 2024-2025

Facts

Course code

DAT912

Version

1

Credits (ECTS)

10

Semester tution start

Spring, Autumn

Number of semesters

1

Exam semester

Spring, Autumn

Language of instruction

English

Offered by

Content

The course covers advanced topics in formal methods for specifying systems, emphasizing languages and tools for model checking and proving the safety, liveness, and temporal properties of system designs and specifications.

We introduce these formal methods with basic examples before we move on to our main target: advanced distributed system protocols such as voting, distributed transaction commit, distributed consensus (Paxos), state machine replication, and Byzantine fault tolerant protocols. We apply a model checker and a proof system to verify a system's safety and temporal properties.

Learning outcome

Knowledge

  • Be familiar with the general principles of formal methods for specifying systems.
  • Be familiar with the mathematics and formalism needed to specify a system design formally.
  • Be familiar with techniques required to limit the state-space explosion problem.
  • Be familiar with techniques for specifying safety and liveness properties and how to prove a system design adheres to the given properties using a model checker and proof system.

Skills

  • Be able to develop advanced distributed system designs with fault tolerance properties.
  • Be able to modularize and refine system specifications.
  • Be able to machine-check and prove interesting properties of a system's design.

General competency

  • Know how to specify and prove or model check properties of advanced distributed computer systems.

Required prerequisite knowledge

None

Exam

Form of assessment Weight Duration Marks Aid
Project 1/1 1 Semesters Passed / Not Passed

The group project report will be evaluated with pass/fail. All group members must contribute equally to all aspects of the report and development of specifications, models, etc. Each group member can receive a different result based on their performance during an oral examination.

Coursework requirements

Oral presentation

Exercises are mandatory and must be presented during the weekly meetings.

A final group project must also be completed based on a specific system design that will be decided jointly with the students. The project should be completed in the chosen modeling language and tool, and corresponding model checking and proof system results should be documented in a final report. The model source files and dependencies should be submitted separately and as part of the report, e.g., as an appendix.

Course teacher(s)

Course teacher:

Leander Nikolaus Jehl

Course coordinator:

Hein Meling

Head of Department:

Tom Ryen

Method of work

We meet weekly for 4 hours and discuss selected exercises from the course material. Each student walks through their solution. Later in the course, the group will specify a selected system and prove its safety and liveness properties.

The course is only given on demand. The working method may deviate in the case of meager student numbers.

Course assessment

There must be an early dialogue between the course supervisor, the student union representative and the students. The purpose is feedback from the students for changes and adjustments in the course for the current semester.In addition, a digital subject evaluation must be carried out at least every three years. Its purpose is to gather the students experiences with the course.

Literature

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