Partial Order Reduction for Verification of Spatial Properties of Pi-Calculus Processes

Abstract

Mechanical tools have recently been developed that enable computer-aided verification of spatial properties of concurrent systems. To be practical, these tools are expected to deal with the state-space explosion problem. In order to alleviate this problem, we develop partial order reduction for verification of spatial properties of pi-calculus processes. The main issue is that spatial logics are very expressive and some spatial formulas prevent partial order reduction. After discussing this issue, we propose a restricted spatial logic such that partial order reduction holds. Our approach relies on exploiting partially confluent communications and on identifying invisible communications in the pi-calculus, for which we propose a simple syntactic criterion.