Abstract

ion The main problem with model checking is the state explosion problem -- the state space grows exponentially with system size. Two methods have some popularity in attacking this problem: compositional methods and abstraction. While they cannot solve the problem in general, they do offer significant improvements in performance. The direct method of verifying that a circuit has a property f is to show the model M satisfies f . The idea behind abstraction is that instead of verifying property f of model M , we verify property f A of model MA and the answer we get helps us answer the original problem. The system MA is an abstraction of the system M . One possibility is to build an abstraction MA that is equivalent (e.g. bisimilar [48]) to M . This sometimes leads to performance advantages if the state space of MA is smaller than M . This type of abstraction would more likely be used in model comparison (e.g. as in [38]). Typically, the behaviour of an abstraction is not equivalent...

Citations