A Constructor-Based Reachability Logic for Rewrite Theories

Reachability logic has been applied to \(\mathbb {K}\) rewrite-rule-based language definitions as a language-generic logic of programs. To be able to verify not just code but also distributed system designs, a new rewrite-theory-generic reachability logic is presented and proved sound for a wide class of rewrite theories. Constructor-based semantic unification, matching, and satisfiability procedures greatly increase the range of decidable background theories that can be used in reachability logic proofs. New methods for proving invariants of possibly never terminating distributed systems are developed, and experiments with a prototype implementation illustrating the new proof methods are presented.