Symbolic reachability analysis of higher-order context-free processes

  • Authors:
  • Ahmed Bouajjani;Antoine Meyer

  • Affiliations:
  • Liafa, Univ. of Paris 7, Case 7014, Paris, France;Liafa, Univ. of Paris 7, Case 7014, Paris, France

  • Venue:
  • FSTTCS'04 Proceedings of the 24th international conference on Foundations of Software Technology and Theoretical Computer Science
  • Year:
  • 2004

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Abstract

We consider the problem of symbolic reachability analysis of higher-order context-free processes. These models are generalizations of the context-free processes (also called BPA processes) where each process manipulates a data structure which can be seen as a nested stack of stacks. Our main result is that, for any higher-order context-free process, the set of all predecessors of a given regular set of configurations is regular and effectively constructible. This result generalizes the analogous result which is known for level 1 context-free processes. We show that this result holds also in the case of backward reachability analysis under a regular constraint on configurations. As a corollary, we obtain a symbolic model checking algorithm for the temporal logic E(U,X) with regular atomic predicates, i.e., the fragment of CTL restricted to the EU and EX modalities.