Empirically Efficient Verification for a Class of Infinite-State Systems

Abstract

Well-structured transition systems (WSTS) are a broad and well-studied class of infinite-state systems, for which the problem of verifying the reachability of an upward-closed set of error states is decidable (subject to some technicalities). Recently, Bingham proposed a new algorithm for this problem, but applicable only to the special cases of broadcast protocols and petri nets. The algorithm exploits finite-state symbolic model checking and was shown to outperform the classical WSTS verification algorithm on a contrived example family of petri nets. In this work, we generalize the earlier results to handle a larger class of WSTS, which we dub nicely sliceable, that includes broadcast protocols, petri nets, context-free grammars, and lossy channel systems. We also add an optimization to the algorithm that accelerates convergence. In addition, we introduce a new reduction that soundly converts the verification of parameterized systems with unbounded conjunctive guards into a verification problem on nicely sliceable WSTS. The reduction is complete if a certain decidable side condition holds. This allows us to access industrially relevant challenge problems from parameterized memory system verification. Our empirical results show that, although our new method performs worse than the classical approach on small petri net examples, it performs substantially better on the larger examples based on real, parameterized protocols (e.g., German's cache coherence protocol, with data paths).