Exploring very large state spaces using genetic algorithms

Authors:
Patrice Godefroid;Sarfraz Khurshid
Affiliations:
Bell Laboratories, Lucent Technologies, Lisle, IL, USA;Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Laboratory for Computer Science, Cambridge, MA, USA
Venue:
International Journal on Software Tools for Technology Transfer (STTT) - Special section on tools and algorithms for the construction and analysis of systems
Year:
2004

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Abstract

We present a novel framework for exploring very large state spaces of concurrent reactive systems. Our framework exploits application-independent heuristics using genetic algorithms to guide a state-space search toward error states. We have implemented this framework in conjunction with VeriSoft, a tool for exploring the state spaces of software applications composed of several concurrent processes executing arbitrary code. We present experimental results obtained with several examples of programs, including a C implementation of a public-key authentication protocol. We discuss heuristics and properties of state spaces that help a genetic search detect deadlocks and assertion violations. For finding errors in very large state spaces, our experiments show that a genetic search using simple heuristics can significantly outperform random and systematic searches.