Compositional Reachability Analysis for Efficient Modular Verification of Asynchronous Designs

Abstract

Compositional verification is essential to address state explosion in model checking. Traditionally, an over-approximate context is needed for each individual component in a system for sound verification. This may cause state explosion for the intermediate results as well as inefficiency for abstraction refinement. This paper presents an opposite approach, a compositional reachability method, which constructs the state space of each component from an under-approximate context gradually until a counter-example is found or a fixpoint in state space is reached. This method has an additional advantage in that counter-examples, if there are any, can be found much earlier, thus leading to faster verification. Furthermore, this modular verification framework does not require complex compositional reasoning rules. The experimental results indicate that this method is promising.