New developments in the theory of Grobner bases and applications to formal verification

We present foundational work on standard bases over rings and on Boolean Grobner bases in the framework of Boolean functions. The research was motivated by our collaboration with electrical engineers and computer scientists on problems arising from formal verification of digital circuits. In fact, algebraic modelling of formal verification problems is developed on the word-level as well as on the bit-level. The word-level model leads to Grobner basis in the polynomial ring over Z/2 n while the bit-level model leads to Boolean Grobner bases. In addition to the theoreti- cal foundations of both approaches, the algorithms have been implemented. Using these implementations we show that special data structures and the exploitation of symmetries make Grobner bases competitive to state-of-the-art tools from formal verification but having the advantage of being systematic and more flexible.