Interactive visualization of large state spaces

  • Authors:

  • Jan Friso Groote;Frank Van Ham

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Computer Science, Technische Universiteit Eindhoven, 513, 5600 MB, Eindhoven, The Netherlands;Department of Computer Science, Technische Universiteit Eindhoven, 513, 5600 MB, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

  • Venue:
  • International Journal on Software Tools for Technology Transfer (STTT) - Special section on Tools and Algorithms for the Construction and Analysis of Systems
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

Insight into the global structure of a state space is of great help in the analysis of the underlying process. We advocate the use of visualization for this purpose and present a method to visualize the structure of very large state spaces with millions of nodes. The method uses a clustering based on an equivalence relation to obtain a simplified representation, which is used as a backbone for the display of the entire state space. With this visualization we are able to answer questions about the global structure of a state space that cannot easily be answered by conventional methods. We show this by presenting a number of visualizations of real-world protocols .