Seven at one stroke: LTL model checking for high-level specifications in B, Z, CSP, and more

Abstract

The size of formal models is steadily increasing and there is a demand from industrial users to be able to use expressive temporal query languages for validating and exploring high-level formal specifications. We present an extension of LTL, which is well adapted for validating B, Z and CSP specifications. We present a generic, flexible LTL model checker, implemented inside the PROB tool, that can be applied to a multitude of formalisms such as B, Z, CSP, B||CSP, as well as Object Petri nets, compensating CSP, and dSL. Our algorithm can deal with deadlock states, partially explored state spaces, past operators, and can be combined with existing symmetry reduction techniques of PROB. We establish correctness of our algorithm in general, as well as combined with symmetry reduction. Finally, we present various applications and empirical results of our tool, showing that it can be applied successfully in practice.