Formal verification of workflow compositions

[danielbentes]

Context

Workflow compositions are currently validated syntactically and semantically (L1–L4 conformance), but there is no formal proof that workflows satisfy safety properties like termination, type safety, checkpoint coverage, or conflict freedom. (Roadmap Section 4.5)

Objective

Apply formal methods to prove safety properties of workflow compositions, providing mathematical guarantees beyond testing.

Tasks

• Implement type-level safety proofs for binding chains (no runtime type errors)
• Implement liveness verification (workflows always terminate or explicitly diverge)
• Implement checkpoint coverage verification (every mutation path has a checkpoint)
• Implement conflict-freedom verification (no conflicting capabilities in parallel groups)
• Integrate with model checkers (TLA+, Alloy, or domain-specific verifier)
• Verify all 12 reference workflows as a baseline

Acceptance Criteria

• Type-level proofs guarantee no runtime type errors in binding chains
• Liveness verification confirms workflows terminate or explicitly mark divergence
• Checkpoint coverage verification confirms every mutation path has a preceding checkpoint
• Conflict-freedom verification confirms no conflicting capabilities execute in parallel
• All 12 reference workflows pass formal verification

Related

• Workflow catalog: schemas/workflow_catalog.yaml
• Capability ontology: schemas/capability_ontology.yaml (conflicts_with edges)
• Workflow validator: tools/validate_workflows.py
• Conformance tests: scripts/run_conformance.py