Logics of Specification Languages

By a specification language we understand a formal system of syntax, semantics and proof rules. The syntax and semantics define a language; the proof rules define a proof system. Specifications are expressions in the language, and reasoning over properties of these specifications is done within the proof system. This book presents comprehensive studies on nine specification languages and their logics of reasoning.

This book contains the refereed proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Theorem Proving in Higher Order Logics, TPHOLs 2007, held in Kaiserslautern, Germany, September 2007. Among the topics of this volume are formal semantics of specification, modeling, and programming languages, specification and verification of hardware and software, formalization of mathematical theories, advances in theorem prover technology, as well as industrial application of theorem provers.

In this monograph we introduce and examine four new temporal logic formalisms that can be used as specification languages for the automated verification of the reliability of hardware and software designs with respect to a desired behavior. The work is organized in two parts. In the first part two logics for computations, the graded computation tree logic and the computation tree logic with minimal model quantifiers are discussed. These have proved to be useful in describing correct executions of monolithic closed systems. The second part focuses on logics for strategies, strategy logic and memoryful alternating-time temporal logic, which have been successfully applied to formalize several properties of interactive plays in multi-entities systems modeled as multi-agent games.