Systematic acceleration in regular model checking

• Authors: Bengt Jonsson;Mayank Saksena
• Venue: CAV'07 Proceedings of the 19th international conference on Computer aided verification
• Year: 2007

Regular model checking is a form of symbolic model checking technique for systems whose states can be represented as finite words over a finite alphabet, where regular sets are used as symbolic representation. A major problem in symbolic model checking of parameterized and infinite-state systems is that fixpoint computations to generate the set of reachable states or the set of reachable loops do not terminate in general. Therefore, acceleration techniques have been developed, which calculate the effect of arbitrarily long sequences of transitions generated by some action. We present a systematic method for using acceleration in regular model checking, for the case where each transition changes at most one position in the word; this includes many parameterized algorithms and algorithms on data structures. The method extracts a maximal (in a certain sense) set of actions from a transition relation. These actions, and systematically obtained compositions of them, are accelerated to speed up a fixpoint computation. The extraction can be done on any representation of the transition relation, e.g., as a union of actions or as a single monolithic transducer. Using this approach, we are for the first time able to verify completely automatically both safety and absence of starvation properties for a collection of parameterized synchronization protocols from the literature; for some protocols, we obtain significant improvements in verification time. The results show that symbolic state-space exploration, without using abstractions, is a viable alternative for verification of parameterized systems with a linear topology.