An Incremental Approach to Scope-Bounded Checking Using a Lightweight Formal Method

  • Authors:

  • Danhua Shao;Sarfraz Khurshid;Dewayne E. Perry

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, USA 78712;Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, USA 78712;Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, USA 78712

  • Venue:
  • FM '09 Proceedings of the 2nd World Congress on Formal Methods
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

We present a novel approach to optimize scope-bounded checking programs using a relational constraint solver. Given a program and its correctness specification, the traditional approach translates a bounded code segment of the entire program into a declarative formula and uses a constraint solver to search for any correctness violations. Scalability is a key issue with such approaches since for non-trivial programs the formulas are complex and represent a heavy workload that can choke the solvers. Our insight is that bounded code segments, which can be viewed as a set of (possible) execution paths, naturally lend to incremental checking through a partitioning of the set, where each partition represents a sub-set of paths. The partitions can be checked independently, and thus the problem of scope-bounded checking for the given program reduces to several sub-problems, where each sub-problem requires the constraint solver to check a less complex formula, thereby likely reducing the solver's overall workload. Experimental results show that our approach provides significant speed-ups over the traditional approach.