Model Checking Multithreaded Programs by Means of Reduced Models

Abstract

Java is largely used to develop distributed and concurrent systems, but testing multithreaded systems cannot guarantee the quality of the software; in contrast, verification techniques give us a higher confidence about the system and, among these, model checking methods automatically establish properties of complex systems. Such techniques are usually applied to specification languages, and several environments exist to verify temporal properties of concurrent specifications. In this paper we present an attempt to apply model checking techniques for verifying a subset of multithreaded Java programs. In particular, we use a tool based on the selective mu-calculus logic to check systems described through the CCS specification language.