Formal Methods

School of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science (SEECS), 
National University of Sciences & Technology (NUST),
Sector H-12, Islamabad 44000,
Pakistan

Instructor: Dr. Osman Hasan

Office Hours: By Appointment

Course Description:
In today's world, hardware and software systems are increasingly being used in safety-critical domains, like medicine, transportation, banking and military. An uncaught system bug in systems designed for these application domains can result in disastrous consequences including the loss of human life and thus approximate analysis techniques, like software testing, should not be relied upon for their analysis. This course is about an alternate analysis approach; Formal Methods. Which are computer based mathematical analysis techniques for the specification and verification of systems. The mathematical nature of Formal Methods ensures absolute correctness of software and hardware designs and thus their usage has been integrated in the industrial design flows of all critical systems. This course is particularly focused on introducing the widely used formal methods, their underlying logical theories and their main strengths and weaknesses. 

Text Books