We describe a method for reducing the complexity of temporal logic model checking in systems composed of many parallel processes. The goal is to check properties of the components of a system and then deduce global properties from these local properties. The main difficulty with this type of approach is that local properties are often not preserved at the global level. We present a general framework for using additional interface processes to model the environment for a component. These interface processes are typically much simpler than the full environment of the component. By composing a component with its interface processes and then checking properties of this composition, we can guarantee that these properties will be preserved at the global level. We give two example compositional systems based on the logic CTL*.

The problem of model checking a specification in form of a C program with recursive procedures and many thousands of lines of code has not been addressed before. In this paper, we show how we attack this problem using an abstraction that is formalized with the Cartesian abstraction. It is implemented through a source-to-source transformation into a `Boolean' C program; we give an algorithm to compute the transformation with a cost that is exponential in its theoretical worst-case complexity but feasible in practice.

We study model checking problems for pushdown systems and linear time logics. We show that the global model checking problem (computing the set of configurations, reachable or not, that violate the formula) can be solved in O(gP 3

. We present regular model checking, a framework for algorithmic verification of infinite-state systems with, e.g., queues, stacks, integers, or a parameterized linear topology. States are represented by strings over a finite alphabet and the transition relation by a regular length-preserving relation on strings. Major problems in the verification of parameterized and infinite-state systems are to compute the set of states that are reachable from some set of initial states, and to compute the transitive closure of the transition relation. We present two complementary techniques for these problems. One is a direct automatatheoretic construction, and the other is based on widening. Both techniques are incomplete in general, but we give sufficient conditions under which they work. We also present a method for verifying !-regular properties of parameterized systems, by computation of the transitive closure of a transition relation. 1 Introduction This paper presents regular ...

This paper gives a simple and direct algorithm for computing the always regular set of reachable states of a pushdown system. It then exploits this algorithm for obtaining model checking algorithms for linear-time temporal logic as well as for the logic CTL. For the latter, a new technical tool is introduced: pushdown automata with transitions conditioned on regular predicates on the stack content. Finally, this technical tool is also used to establish that CTL model checking remains decidable when the formulas are allowed to include regular predicates on the stack content.

Abstract. We study congruences on words in order to characterize the class of visibly pushdown languages (Vpl), a subclass of context-free languages. For any language L, we define a natural congruence on words that resembles the syntactic congruence for regular languages, such that this congruence is of finite index if, and only if, L is a Vpl. We then study the problem of finding canonical minimal deterministic automata for Vpls. Though Vpls in general do not have unique minimal automata, we consider a subclass of VPAs called k-module single-entry VPAs that correspond to programs with recursive procedures without input parameters, and show that the class of well-matched Vpls do indeed have unique minimal k-module single-entry automata. We also give a polynomial time algorithm that minimizes such k-module single-entry VPAs. 1 Introduction The class of visibly pushdown languages (Vpl), introduced in [1], is a subclassof context-free languages accepted by pushdown automata in which the input letter determines the type of operation permitted on the stack. Visibly push-down languages are closed under all boolean operations, and problems such as inclusion, that are undecidable for context-free languages, are decidable for Vpl. Vpls are relevant to several applications that use context-free languages suchas the model-checking of software programs using their pushdown models [1-3]. Recent work has shown applications in other contexts: in modeling semanticsof effects in processing XML streams [4], in game semantics for programming languages [5], and in identifying larger classes of pushdown specifications thatadmit decidable problems for infinite games on pushdown graphs [6].

. Recursive state machines (RSMs) enhance the power of ordinary state machines by allowing vertices to correspond either to ordinary states or to potentially recursive invocations of other state machines. RSMs can model the control flow in sequential imperative programs containing recursive procedure calls. They can be viewed as a visual notation extending Statecharts-like hierarchical state machines, where concurrency is disallowed but recursion is allowed. They are also related to various models of pushdown systems studied in the verification and program analysis communities. After introducing RSMs, we focus on whether state-space analysis can be performed efficiently for RSMs. We consider the two central problems for algorithmic analysis and model checking, namely, reachability (is a target state reachable from initial states) and cycle detection (is there a reachable cycle containing an accepting state). We show that both these problems can be solved in time O(n` 2 ) and space O(n`), where n is the size of the recursive machine and ` is the maximum, over all component state machines, of the minimum of the number of entries and the number of exits of each component. We also study the precise relationship between RSMs and closely related models. 1

Abstract. The paper shows that, by an appropriate choice of a rich assertional language, it is possible to extend the utility of symbolic model checking beyond the realm of bdd-represented nite-state systems into the domain of in nite-state systems, leading to a powerful technique for uniform veri cation of unbounded (parameterized) process networks. The main contributions of the paper are a formulation of a general framework for symbolic model checking of in nite-state systems, a demonstration that many individual examples of uniformly veri ed parameterized designs that appear in the literature are special cases of our general approach, verifying the correctness of the Futurebus+ design for all single-bus con gurations, extending the technique to tree architectures, and establishing that the presented method is a precise dual to the top-down invariant generation method used in deductive veri cation. 1

Abstract. Recently, pushdown systems (PDSs) have been extended to weighted PDSs, in which each transition is labeled with a value, and the goal is to determine the meet-over-allpaths value (for paths that meet a certain criterion). This paper shows how weighted PDSs yield new algorithms for certain classes of interprocedural dataflow-analysis problems. 1

We present a generic aproach to the static analysis of concurrent programs with procedures. We model programs as communicating pushdown systems. It is known that typical dataow problems for this model are undecidable, because the emptiness problem for the intersection of context-free languages, which is undecidable, can be reduced to them. In this paper we propose an algebraic framework for de ning abstractions (upper approximations) of context-free languages. We consider two classes of abstractions: nite-chain abstractions, which are abstractions whose domains do not contain any in- nite chains, and commutative abstractions corresponding to classes of languages that contain a word if and only if they contain all its permutations. We show how to compute such approximations by combining automata theoretic techniques with algorithms for solving systems of polynomial inequations in Kleene algebras.