Symbolic backwards-reachability analysis for higher-order pushdown systems

  • Authors:
  • Matthew Hague;C.-H. Luke Ong

  • Affiliations:
  • Oxford University Computing Laboratory, Oxford, UK;Oxford University Computing Laboratory, Oxford, UK

  • Venue:
  • FOSSACS'07 Proceedings of the 10th international conference on Foundations of software science and computational structures
  • Year:
  • 2007

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

Higher-order pushdown systems (PDSs) generalise pushdown systems through the use of higher-order stacks, that is, a nested "stack of stacks" structure. We further generalise higher-order PDSs to higher-order Alternating PDSs (APDSs) and consider the backwards reachability problemover these systems.We prove that given an order-n APDS, the set of configurations from which a given regular set of configurations is reachable is itself regular and computable in n-EXPTIME. We show that the result has several useful applications in the verification of higher-order PDSs such as LTL model checking, alternation-free µ-calculus model checking, and the computation of winning regions of reachability games.