Abstract
Model checking is an efficient formal verification technique that has been applied to a wide spectrum of applications in software engineering. Popular model checking algorithms include Bounded Model Checking (BMC) and Incremental Construction of Inductive Clauses for Indubitable Correctness/Property Directed Reachability(IC3/PDR). The recently proposed Complementary Approximate Reachability (CAR) model checking algorithm has a performance close to BMC in bug-finding, while its depth-first strategy sometimes leads the algorithm to a trap, which will waste lots of computation. In this paper, we enhance the recently proposed Complementary Approximate Reachability (CAR) model checking algorithm by integrating the restart policy, which yields a restartable CAR model (abbreviated as r-CAR). The restart policy can help avoid the trap problem caused by the depth-first strategy and has played an important role in modern SAT-solving algorithms to search for a satisfactory solution. As the bug-finding in model checking is reducible to a similar search problem, the restart policy can be useful to enhance the bug-finding capability. We made an extensive experiment to evaluate the new algorithm. Our results show that out of the 749 industrial instances, r-CAR is able to find 13 instances that the state-of-the-art BMC technique cannot find and can solve more than 11 instances than the original CAR. The new algorithm successfully contributes to the current model-checking portfolio in practice.
Highlights
Model checking [1] is an efficient technique for formal verification that has been applied into most stages of the life cycle in software development to ensure correctness
We argue that comparing r-Complementary Approximate Reachability (CAR)-select, which consists of five different restart configurations, to Bounded Model Checking (BMC) is still fair because we give BMC 5 h
We apply the restart policy to CAR, aiming to get rid of the trap which occurs during the search and make the algorithm not terminate in a reasonable time
Summary
Model checking [1] is an efficient technique for formal verification that has been applied into most stages of the life cycle in software development to ensure correctness. Given a software design M as the model and the formal specification (property) P, which is often written by some temporal logic [28], model checking checks whether P holds for all behaviors of M. To achieve this goal, a model-checking algorithm explores the state space of M by starting from the initial states to all their reachable states in M. The safety model checking can be reduced to the reachability analysis problem [30], and we focus on the safety model checking in this paper
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