Formal Verification of a Partial-Order Reduction Technique for Model Checking

Mechanical theorem proving and model checking are the two main methods of formal verification, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. While mechanical theorem proving is more general, it requires intensive human guidance. Model checking is automatic, but is applicable to a more restricted class of problems. It is appealing to combine these two methods in order to take advantage of their different strengths. Prior research in this direction has focused on how to decompose a verification problem into parts each of which is manageable by one of the two methods. In this paper we explore another possibility: we use mechanical theorem proving to formally verify a meta-theory of model check-ing. As a case study, we use the mechanical theorem prover HOL to verify th