#Understanding of formal methods in general and model checking in particular #####Xiaobin Fang 13126067
###Formal Methods
In computer science, specifically software engineering and hardware engineering, formal methods are a particular kind of mathematically based techniques for the specification, development and verification of software and hardware systems. The use of formal methods for software and hardware design is motivated by the expectation that, as in other engineering disciplines, performing appropriate mathematical analysis can contribute to the reliability and robustness of a design.
Formal methods are best described as the application of a fairly broad variety of theoretical computer science fundamentals, in particular logic calculi, formal languages, automata theory, and program semantics, but also type systems and algebraic data types to problems in software and hardware specification and verification.
###Model Checking
In computer science, model checking refers to the following problem: Given a model of a system, exhaustively and automatically check whether this model meets a given specification. Typically, one has hardware or software systems in mind, whereas the specification contains safety requirements such as the absence of deadlocks and similar critical states that can cause the system to crash. Model checking is a technique for automatically verifying correctness properties of finite-state systems.
In order to solve such a problem algorithmically, both the model of the system and the specification are formulated in some precise mathematical language: To this end, it is formulated as a task in logic, namely to check whether a given structure satisfies a given logical formula. The concept is general and applies to all kinds of logics and suitable structures. A simple model-checking problem is verifying whether a given formula in the propositional logic is satisfied by a given structure.