Reducing Context-Bounded Concurrent Reachability to Sequential Reachability

Abstract

We give a translation from concurrent programs to sequential programs that reduces the context-bounded reachability problem in the concurrent program to a reachability problem in the sequential one. The translation has two salient features: (a) the sequential program tracks, at any time, the local state of only one thread (though it does track multiple copies of shared variables), and (b) all reachable states of the sequential program correspond to reachable states of the concurrent program. We also implement our transformation in the setting of concurrent recursive programs with finite data domains, and show that the resulting sequential program can be model-checked efficiently using existing recursive sequential program reachability tools.