On the Use of Automata-based Techniques in Symbolic Model Checking: Invited Address

Abstract

Checking infinite-state systems is frequently done by encoding infinite sets of states as regular languages. Computing such a regular representation of, say, the reachable set of states of a system requires acceleration techniques that can finitely compute the effect of an unbounded number of transitions. Among the acceleration techniques that have been proposed, one finds both specific and generic techniques. Specific techniques exploit the particular type of system being analyzed, e.g. a system manipulating queues or integers, whereas generic techniques only assume that the transition relation is represented by a finite-state transducer, which has to be iterated. In this paper, we survey two generic techniques that have been presented in [B. Boigelot and A. Legay and P. Wolper, Iterating Transducers in the Large, Proc. 15th Int. Conf. on Computer Aided Verification, Boulder, USA, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, volume 2725, year 2003, pages 223–235] and [B. Boigelot and A. Legay and P. Wolper, Omega-Regular Model Checking, Proc. 10th Int. Conf. on Tools and and Algorithms for the Construction and Analysis of Systems, Barcelona, Spain, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, volume 2988, year 2004, pages 561–575]. Those techniques build on earlier work, but exploits a number of new conceptual and algorithmic ideas, often induced with the help of experiments, that give it a broad scope, as well as good performance.