Verifying systems with infinite but regular state spaces

Abstract

Thanks to the development of a number of efficiency enhancing techniques, state-space exploration based verification, and in particular model checking, has been quite successful for finite-state systems. This has prompted efforts to apply a similar approach to systems with infinite state spaces. Doing so amounts to developing algorithms for computing a symbolic representation of the infinite state space, as opposed to requiring the user to characterize the state space by assertions. Of course, in most cases, this can only be done at the cost of forgoing any general guarantee of success. The goal of this paper is to survey a number of results in this area and to show that a surprisingly common characteristic of the systems that can be analyzed with this approach is that their state space can be represented as a regular language.KeywordsModel CheckRegular LanguageFinite AutomatonReachable StateInteger VectorThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.