USING AN EXTENSIONS OF CTL* FOR SPECIFICATION AND VERIFICATION OF SEQUENTIAL REACTIVE SYSTEMS

Abstract

Sequential reactive systems such as controllers, device drivers, computer interpreters operate with two data streams and transform input streams of data (control signals, instructions) into output streams of control signals (instructions, data). Finite state transducers are widely used as an adequate formal model for information processing systems of this kind. Since runs of transducers develop over time, temporal logics, obviously, could be used as both simple and expressive formalism for specifying the behavior of sequential reactive systems. However, the conventional applied temporal logics (LTL, CTL) do not suit this purpose well, since their formulae are interpreted over omega-languages, whereas the behavior of transducers are represented by binary relations on infinite sequences, i.e. omega-transductions. To provide temporal logic with the ability to take into account this general feature of the behavior of reactive systems, we introduced new extensions of this logic. Two distinguished features characterize these extension: 1) temporal operators are parameterized by sets of streams (languages) admissible for input, and 2) sets (languages) of expected output streams are used as basic predicates. In the previous series of works we studied the expressive power and the model checking problem for Reg-LTL and Reg-CTL which are such extensions of LTL and CTL where the languages mentioned above are regular ones. We discovered that such an extension of temporal logics increases their expressive capability though retains the decidability of the model checking problem. Our next step in the systematic study of expressive and algorithmic properties of new extensions temporal logics is the analysis of the model checking problem for finite state transducers against Reg-CTL* formulae. In this paper we develop a model checking algorithm for Reg-CTL* and show that this problem is in ExpSpace.