The Symbiosis of Formal Methods and Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Formal methods are software engineering approaches with a rigorous mathematical basis that can help ensure the correctness of software systems, especially where safety or security is critical. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has developed very rapidly in the area of Generative AI (GenAI), where questions can be answered with increasingly impressive but potentially unreliable and variable results. This paper surveys research in integrating the two approaches in a synergistic manner. Traditionally, such explorations have required significant manual efforts in searching for and evaluating existing research. However, most relevant publications are now accessible online, and AI tools are increasingly good at answering research questions with more and more reliability. This paper takes the approach of using GenAI to evaluate research questions on combining formal methods and AI-related techniques. The paper assesses the usefulness and validity of these results. With recent improvements in AI search tools, the approach is now a useful aid to researchers, significantly reducing the time needed to survey existing research, while always needing human checking by an expert. In addition, the combination of formal methods and AI approaches looks to be an interesting and beneficial research area with potential industrial-scale applications in the future. This paper does not claim to be an exhaustive systematic review, but rather demonstrates an AI-assisted search process to aid in literature surveys within a fast-moving research area.