Dynamic Clock Elimination in Parametric Timed Automata.

Abstract

The formalism of parametric timed automata provides designers with a formal way to specify and verify real-time concurrent systems where iming requirements are unknown (or parameters). Such models are usually subject to the state space explosion. A popular way to partially reduce the size of the state space is to reduce the number of clock variables. In this work, we present a technique for dynamically eliminating clocks. Experiments using IMITATOR show a diminution of the number of states and of the computation time, and in some cases allow termination of the analysis of models that could not terminate otherwise. More surprisingly, even when the number of clocks remains constant, there is little noticeable overhead in applying the proposed clock elimination.