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Optimistic synchronization-based state-space reduction

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Abstract

Reductions that aggregate fine-grained transitions into coarser transitions can significantly reduce the cost of automated verification, by reducing the size of the state space. We propose a reduction that can exploit common synchronization disciplines, such as the use of mutual exclusion for accesses to shared data structures. Exploiting them using traditional reduction theorems requires checking that the discipline is followed in the original (i.e., unreduced) system. That check can be prohibitively expensive. This paper presents a reduction that instead requires checking whether the discipline is followed in the reduced system. This check may be much cheaper, because the reachable state space is smaller.

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Notes

  1. The axioms are equivalent to Kozen's axioms for Kleene algebra [14], plus the three axioms for omega terms.

  2. Magic is the program that has no possible executions (and so satisfies every possible specification). Of course, it cannot be implemented.

  3. Note that \( u_i \) and \( v_i \) can be sums of nondeterministic actions that correspond to individual transitions of process i.

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Acknowledgments

We thank Shaz Qadeer for telling us about exclusive access predicates, Liqiang Wang for doing the experiments with JPF, and Patrice Godefroid for insightful comments about partial-order methods.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Computer Science Department, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY, 11794-4400, USA

    Scott D. Stoller

  2. Microsoft Corp., One Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA, 98052, USA

    Ernie Cohen

Authors
  1. Scott D. Stoller
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  2. Ernie Cohen
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Scott D. Stoller.

Additional information

This work was supported in part by NSF under Grants CCR-9876058, CCR-0205376, and CNS-0509230 and ONR under Grants N00014-01-1-0109 and N00014-02-1-0363.

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Stoller, S.D., Cohen, E. Optimistic synchronization-based state-space reduction. Form Method Syst Des 28, 263–289 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10703-006-0003-4

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