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A symbolic manipulator for automated verification of reactive systems with heterogeneous data types

  • Special section on trends in verification and validation
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Abstract

In this paper, we present the design and implementation of the Composite Symbolic Library, a symbolic manipulator for model checking systems with heterogeneous data types. Our tool provides a common interface for different symbolic representations, such as BDDs, for representing Boolean logic formulas and polyhedral representations for linear arithmetic formulas. Based on this common interface, these data structures are combined using a disjunctive composite representation. We propose several heuristics for efficient manipulation of this composite representation and present experimental results that demonstrate their performance. We used an object-oriented design to implement the Composite Symbolic Library. We imported the CUDD library (a BDD library) and the Omega Library (a linear arithmetic constraint manipulator that uses polyhedral representations) to our tool by writing wrappers around them which conform to our symbolic representation interface. Our tool supports polymorphic verification procedures which dynamically select symbolic representations based on the input specification. Our symbolic representation library can be used as an interface between different symbolic libraries, model checkers, and specification languages. We expect our tool to be useful in integrating different tools and techniques for symbolic model checking, and in comparing their performance.

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  1. Department of Computer Science, University of California, CA 93106, Santa Barbara, USA

    Tuba Yavuz-Kahveci & Tevfik Bultan

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  1. Tuba Yavuz-Kahveci
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  2. Tevfik Bultan
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Correspondence to Tuba Yavuz-Kahveci or Tevfik Bultan.

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Yavuz-Kahveci, T., Bultan, T. A symbolic manipulator for automated verification of reactive systems with heterogeneous data types. Int J Softw Tools Technol Transfer 5, 15–33 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10009-002-0091-4

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