Classifying properties: an alternative to the safety-liveness classification

  • Authors:

  • Gleb Naumovich;Lori A. Clarke

  • Affiliations:

  • Polytechnic University, Brooklyn, Department of Computer and Information Science, Brooklyn, NY;Computer Science Department, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Massachusetts

  • Venue:
  • SIGSOFT '00/FSE-8 Proceedings of the 8th ACM SIGSOFT international symposium on Foundations of software engineering: twenty-first century applications
  • Year:
  • 2000

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Abstract

Traditionally, verification properties have been classified as safety or liveness properties. While this taxonomy has an attractive simplicity and is useful for identifying the appropriate analysis algorithm for checking a property, determining whether a property is safety, liveness, or neither can require significant mathematical insight on the part of the analyst. In this paper, we present an alternative property taxonomy. We argue that this taxonomy is a more natural classification of the kinds of questions that analysts want to ask. Moreover, most classes in our taxonomy have a known, direct mapping to the safety-liveness classification, and thus the appropriate analysis algorithm can be automatically determined.