Interactive visualization of large state spaces

Abstract

Insight into the global structure of a state space is of great help in the analysis of the underlying process. We advocate the use of visualization for this purpose and present a method to visualize the structure of very large state spaces with millions of nodes. The method uses a clustering based on an equivalence relation to obtain a simplified representation, which is used as a backbone for the display of the entire state space. With this visualization we are able to answer questions about the global structure of a state space that cannot easily be answered by conventional methods. We show this by presenting a number of visualizations of real-world protocols .