Deciding the verification problem for abstract state machines

• Authors: Antje Nowack
• Venue: ASM'03 Proceedings of the abstract state machines 10th international conference on Advances in theory and practice
• Year: 2003

We study the decidability of general verification problems for ASMs. This corresponds to the question whether all computations of an ASM satisfy a property (usually expressed in some temporal logic). Because of undecidability in the general case, one has to identify classes of ASMs and classes of properties in order to receive positive decidability results. One idea for this could be to put simple restrictions on the ASMs as forbidding certain advanced constructs. But it turns out that this does not help much. Additionally, the restrictions in those cases are very strong. Consequently, one has to look for others. Such restrictions may result from techniques which are intended to be used in the proofs of decidability. One proof technique is the reduction to a decidable reasoning problem in logic. In [8] and [10], this has been applied to receive some positive decidability results. In this paper, we identify further classes of ASMs and classes of properties for which the general verification problem is decidable. Each proof is a reduction to the satisfiability problem of a fragment of linear temporal first-order logic which has respectively been proved to be decidable in [6] or [7].