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Analysis, Verification and Transformation for Declarative Programming and Intelligent Systems pp 151–169Cite as

The Role of Abstraction in Model Checking

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 13160))

Abstract

The intimate relationship between model checking and abstract interpretation has been shown in a large number of relevant papers in literature. Maybe the use of abstract interpretation to reduce the well-known state space explosion problem in model checking was the first and most successful combination of these two techniques. However, this is not the only possible way both methods can collaborate to improve the software reliability. Along these last 20 years, our contributions in this area have been focussed on the practical application of abstract interpretation in the context of model checking tools. From our point of view, model checking tools such as spin can be hardly improved in terms of efficiency. Thus, we have concentrated on applying abstraction to completely reuse the underlying model checkers. We have applied our ideas to different modelling and programming languages, tools and real applications. In this paper, we summarize some of these contributions.

This work has been supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities project RTI2018-099777-B-I00 and the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 815178 (5GENESIS).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The state-vector is the spin structure where each state is stored.

  2. 2.

    Observe that f does not have to be abstracted due to execution traces of \(M^\alpha _u\) are execution traces of M.

  3. 3.

    If the sequence is finite, we assume that the last state is infinitely repeated.

  4. 4.

    never_claim is the promela process that implements the non-deterministic Büchi automata of the ltl formula.

  5. 5.

    Note that this does not contradict the previous satisfaction result, since in this result we do not assume any particular algorithm to evaluate the property on the projected trace.

  6. 6.

    This is because spin transforms these properties into their corresponding negations.

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Acknowledgements

The three of us are very honoured to have had the opportunity to participate in this volume devoted to celebrating the Manuel Hermenegildo’s achievements in research. In particular, the first author is very grateful for his advice early in her research career and for introducing her to the exciting field of abstract interpretation.

Finally, we want to recognize the contributions of former members of morse team, specially to Jesús Martínez, David Sanán, Alberto Salmerón, Pedro de la Cámara, Christophe Joubert, Ana Rosario Espada and Damián Adalid.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Andalucía Tech, ITIS Software, Universidad de Málaga, C/ Arquitecto Francisco Peñalosa, 18, 29010, Málaga, Spain

    María-del-Mar Gallardo, Pedro Merino & Laura Panizo

Authors
  1. María-del-Mar Gallardo
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  2. Pedro Merino
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  3. Laura Panizo
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Correspondence to María-del-Mar Gallardo .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. IMDEA Software Institute, Pozuelo de Alarcón, Madrid, Spain

    Pedro Lopez-Garcia

  2. Roskilde University, Roskilde, Denmark

    John P. Gallagher

  3. Università di Verona, Verona, Italy

    Roberto Giacobazzi

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Gallardo, MdM., Merino, P., Panizo, L. (2023). The Role of Abstraction in Model Checking. In: Lopez-Garcia, P., Gallagher, J.P., Giacobazzi, R. (eds) Analysis, Verification and Transformation for Declarative Programming and Intelligent Systems. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13160. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31476-6_8

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