New techniques for instantiation and proof production in SMT solving. (Nouvelles techniques pour l'instanciation et la production des preuves dans SMT)

In many formal methods applications it is common to rely on SMT solvers to automatically discharge conditions that need to be checked and provide certificates of their results. In this thesis we aim both to improve their efficiency of and to increase their reliability. Our first contribution is a uniform framework for reasoning with quantified formulas in SMT solvers, in which generally various instantiation techniques are employed. We show that the major instantiation techniques can be all cast in this unifying framework. Its basis is the problem of E-ground (dis)unification, a variation of the classic rigid E -unification problem. We introduce a decision procedure to solve this problem in practice: Congruence Closure with Free Variables (CCFV). We measure the impact of optimizations and instantiation techniques based on CCFV in the SMT solvers veriT and CVC4, showing that our implementations exhibit improvements over state-of-the-art approaches in several benchmark libraries stemming from real world applications. Our second contribution is a framework for processing formulas while producing detailed proofs. The main components of our proof producing framework are a generic contextual recursion algorithm and an extensible set of inference rules. With suitable data structures, proof generation creates only a linear-time overhead, and proofs can be checked in linear time. We also implemented the approach in veriT. This allowed us to dramatically simplify the code base while increasing the number of problems for which detailed proofs can be produced.