Well-abstracted transition systems: application to FIFO automata

Abstract

Formal methods based on symbolic representations have been found to be very effective. In the case of infinite state systems, there has been a great deal of interest in accelerations —a technique for characterizing the result of iterating an execution sequence an arbitrary number of times, in a sound, but not necessarily complete, way. We propose the use of abstractions as a general framework to design accelerations. We investigate SemiLinear Regular Expressions (SLREs) as symbolic representations for FIFO automata. In particular, we show that: (a) SLREs are easy to manipulate , (b) SLREs form the core of known FIFO symbolic representations, and (c) SLREs are sufficient to represent the effect of arbitrary iterations of a loop for FIFO automata with one channel.