Lazy Reachability Checking for Timed Automata with Discrete Variables

Abstract

Systems and software with time dependent behavior are often formally specified using timed automata. For practical real-time systems, these specifications typically contain discrete data variables with nontrivial data flow besides real-valued clock variables. In this paper, we propose a lazy abstraction method for the location reachability problem of timed automata that can be used to efficiently control the visibility of discrete variables occurring in such specifications, this way alleviating state space explosion. The proposed abstraction refinement strategy is based on interpolation for variable assignments and symbolic backward search. We combine in a single algorithm our abstraction method with known efficient lazy abstraction algorithms for the handling of clock variables. Our experiments show that the proposed method performs favorably when compared to other lazy methods, and is suitable to significantly reduce the number of states generated during state space exploration.