TAME: A PVS Interface to Simplify Proofs for Automata

Although a number of mechanical provers have been introduced and applied widely by academic researchers, these provers are rarely used in the practical development of software. For mechanical provers to be used more widely in practice, two major barriers must be overcome. First, the languages provided by the mechanical provers for expressing the required system behavior must be more natural for software developers. Second, the reasoning steps supported by mechanical provers are usually at too low and detailed a level and therefore discourage use of the prover. To help remove these barriers, we are developing a system called TAME, a high-level user interface to PVS for specifying and proving properties of automata models. TAME provides both a standard speciication format for automata models and numerous high-level proof steps appropriate for reasoning about automata models. In previous work, we have shown how TAME can be useful in proving properties about systems described as Lynch-Vaandrager Timed Automata models. TAME has the potential to be used as a PVS interface for other speciication methods that are specialized to deene automata models. This paper rst describes recent improvements to TAME, and then presents our initial results in using TAME to provide theorem proving support for the SCR (Software Cost Reduction) requirements method, a method with a wide range of other mechanized support.