This page gives highlights of past lectures and provides lecture notes, reading assignments, and exercises.


Dates Topics and Readings Homework
Aug 27
Aug 29

Course introduction and administration. Introduction to Formal Methods.

Introduction to sets and relations


Required Readings:
  • Syllabus
  • Course overview [pdf] and introduction [pdf]
  • [Haxt10] An introduction to formal methods, with examples of industrial usage
  • Lecture notes on sets and relations (as needed) [pdf]
Recommended Readings:
  • [vLam00] An introduction to formal specifications, and a survey of formal specification approaches.
  • Chap. 1-2 of [Gara13] A fairly comprehensive recent survey on the use and practice of FM.
  • [Barr13] notes on expert reports and testimony of the Toyota Unintended Acceleration Litigation.
All exercises in lecture notes
Sep 3
Sep 5

Recap of basic notions in set theory. Relations and relational operators.

Modeling general software systems. Introduction to the Alloy modeling language. Alloy's foundations. Signatures, fields and multiplicity constraints.

Modeling simple domains in Alloy. Generating and analyzing model instances with the Alloy Analyzer.

Relations and operations on them. Formulas, Boolean operators and quantifiers. Expressing constraints on relations using Alloy formulas.


Required Readings:
  • Lecture notes: An introduction to Alloy 4 - Part 1 [pptx] and 2 [pptx]
Recommended Readings:
All exercises in lecture notes
Sep 10
Sep 12

More on the Alloy language. Facts and assertions. Checking models and assertions with the Alloy Analyzer. Examples and exercises.

Required Readings:
  • Lecture notes: An introduction to Alloy 4 - Part 2 [pptx]
Recommended Readings:
All exercises in lecture notes
Sep 17
Sep 19

Practice with modeling in Alloy: the Academia domain. Examples and exercises.

Alloy's module system. Motivations and uses. Parametric modules. An example: the predefined Ordering module.


Required Readings: Recommended Readings:
Homework #1 assigned, exercises in lecture notes.
Sep 24
Sep 26

Modeling dynamic systems in Alloy. Example: making the family model dynamic.

General approach: dynamic systems as state transition systems. Operators. Preconditions, postconditions and frame conditions.

Examples of operators for the family model.


Required Readings:
Homework #1 due, all exercises in lecture notes
Oct 1
Oct 3

More on modeling dynamic systems in Alloy. Example: rovers on a two-dimensional space. Group exercises.

A complete Alloy modeling case study: the hotel room lock system.


Required Readings:
  • Lecture notes: Autonomous Rovers [pptx]
  • The rover.als rover model in dynamic systems examples
  • Lecture notes: Hotel Lock System [pptx]
  • The book/chapter6/hotel*.als sample models (first 2 only) in the Alloy Analyzer
All exercises in lecture notes
Oct 8
Oct 10

Introduction to reactive systems. Introduction to the Lustre specification language.

Examples of Lustre programs. Specifying simple reactive systems in Lustre. Simulating Lustre programs with the Kind 2 tool (online examples).

Practice with writing Lustre models and expressing their properties.

Simulating Lustre programs with the Kind 2 tool (online examples).


Required Readings:
  • Lecture notes: Reactive Systems and the Lustre Language [Part 1, Part 2]
  • Chap. 1 of [Halb02], a Lustre tutorial
Project #1 assigned, All exercises in lecture notes
Oct 15

Practice with writing Lustre models and expressing their properties.

Required Readings:
  • Lustre examples on the Kind 2 online page except for CruiseController.
Simulate and verify in Kind 2 all Lustre examples in the readings.
Oct 17 Midterm Exam #1
Oct 22
Oct 24

More practice with writing Lustre models and expressing their properties.

Checking properties via synchronous observers. Useful temporal operators.

A few examples. Checking properties. Boolean Switches and traffic light examples. In-class exercises.


Required Readings:
  • Lustre examples on the Kind 2 online page except for CruiseController.
Homework #2 assigned. simulate and verify in Kind 2 all Lustre examples in the readings.
Oct 29
Oct 31

Contract-based specification and compositional verification.

Motivation and uses. Extending Lustre with contracts. Contract basics: assumptions, guarantees and execution modes. Example of contracts.


Required Readings:
  • Lecture notes: a Mode-aware Contract Language for Reactive Systems [pdf]
  • StopwatchSpec and ElevatorSpec examples on the Kind 2 online page.
Recommended Readings:
Project #1 Due.
Nov 5
Nov 7

Specifying and verifying programs in high-level programming languages. Introduction to Dafny. Main features. Method contracts in Dafny. Specifying pre and post-conditions. Compositional verification of methods through the use of contracts. Abstraction of while loops by loop invariants. Examples.


Required Readings: Recommended Readings:
  • [Wing95], which provides several hints to specifiers
Homework #3 Assigned.
Nov 12
Nov 14

More on loop invariants in Dafny. Functions and predicates. Complex specifications using recursive functions. Termination of while loops and recursive functions in Dafny. Arrays and quantified verification conditions. Loop invariants for arrays. Examples.


Required Readings: Recommended Readings:
Exercises from the Dafny examples.
Nov 19
Nov 21

Introduction to value types in Dafny: sets and sequences. Classes. Constructors, fields and class methods. Class invariants. Ghost fields. Using ghost fields to represent abstract states. Connecting concrete and abstract state in a class.


Required Readings:
Nov 26
Nov 28
No class (Thanksgiving Break)
Dec 3

Introduction to inductive theorem proving in Dafny.


Recommended Readings:
Homework #3 Due.
Dec 5 Midterm Exam #2 TBA
Dec 10
Dec 12
TBA TBA