Sheaves and Geometric Logic and Applications to Modular Verification of Complex Systems

In this paper we show that states, transitions and behavior of concurrent systems can often be modeled as sheaves over a suitable topological space (where the topology expresses how the interacting systems share the information). This allows us to use results from categorical logic (and in particular geometric logic) to describe which type of properties are transferred, if valid locally in all component systems, also at a global level, to the system obtained by interconnecting the individual systems. The main area of application is to modular verification of complex systems. We illustrate the ideas by means of an example involving a family of interacting controllers for trains on a rail track