Abstract

There has been considerable progress in the domain of software veri cation over the last few years. This advancement has been driven, to a large extent, by the emergence of powerful yet automated abstraction techniques like predicate abstraction. However, the state space explosion problem in model checking remains the chief obstacle to the practical veri cation of real-world distributed systems. Even in the case of purely sequential programs, a crucial requirement to make predicate abstraction eective is to use as few predicates as possible. This is because, in the worst case, the state space of the abstraction generated (and consequently the time and memory complexity of the abstraction process) is exponential in the number of predicates involved. In addition, for concurrent programs, the number of reachable states could grow exponentially with the number of components.

Citations