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A New Refinement Strategy for CEGAR-Based Industrial Model Checking

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Hardware and Software: Verification and Testing (HVC 2015)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 9434))

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Abstract

This paper presents a novel refinement strategy in the setting of counterexample-guided abstraction refinement (CEGAR)-based model checking. More specifically, the approach shown builds on lazy abstraction in the context of predicate abstraction. While the concept of interpolants is typically used for refinement, this paper employs unsatisfiability cores together with weakest preconditions. The new refinement technique is especially applicable in the setting where interpolants are hard to compute, such as for McCarthy’s theory of arrays or for the theory of fixed-width bit vectors. It is implemented within a model-checking tool developed for the verification of industrial-critical systems and outperforms current refinement strategies on several examples.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Actually, a symbolic abstraction structure also contains an operator for computation of abstract states that can reach a given abstract state and an operator for computation of concrete states reachable from a given concrete state. These operators are required for a backward search, i.e. when the lazy abstraction algorithm constructs an ART starting from the error region and iteratively checks whether an initial region is reachable. In this paper we only consider lazy abstraction in combination with the forward search (Algorithm 1) and refer the reader to [5] for more details on the use of lazy abstraction in combination with backward search.

  2. 2.

    Due to page limitations, we refrain from formulating the correctness criteria precisely here but refer the reader to [5] for more details.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Lübeck, Lübeck, Germany

    Martin Leucker & Grigory Markin

  2. Siemens AG, Nuremberg, Germany

    Martin R. Neuhäußer

Authors
  1. Martin Leucker
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  2. Grigory Markin
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  3. Martin R. Neuhäußer
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Correspondence to Grigory Markin .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Leicester, Leicester, United Kingdom

    Nir Piterman

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Leucker, M., Markin, G., Neuhäußer, M.R. (2015). A New Refinement Strategy for CEGAR-Based Industrial Model Checking. In: Piterman, N. (eds) Hardware and Software: Verification and Testing. HVC 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9434. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-26287-1_10

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-26287-1_10

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