Automatic verification of concurrent systems using a formula-based compositional approach

Abstract.

When verifying concurrent systems, described by transition systems, state explosion is one of the most serious problems: systems are often described by transition systems with a prohibitive number of states. The primary cause of this problem is the parallel composition of interacting processes. In the recent years, compositional techniques have been developed to attack the state explosion problem. These techniques are based on dividing the verification task into simpler tasks, exploiting the natural decomposition of complex systems into processes. In this paper we present a formula-based compositional approach that allows us to deduce a property of a parallel composition of processes by checking it only on a component process. The approach can be automated and it is completely transparent to the user.