Flow analysis for verifying properties of concurrent software systems

Abstract

This article describes FLAVERS, a finite-state verification approach that analyzes whether concurrent systems satisfy user-defined, behavioral properties. FLAVERS automatically creates a compact, event-based model of the system that supports efficient dataflow analysis. FLAVERS achieves this efficiency at the cost of precision. Analysts, however, can improve the precision of analysis results by selectively and judiciously incorporating additional semantic information into an analysis.We report on an empirical study of the performance of the FLAVERS/Ada toolset applied to a collection of multitasking Ada systems. This study indicates that sufficient precision for proving system properties can usually be achieved and that the cost for such analysis typically grows as a low-order polynomial in the size of the system.