Abstract

The appeal of automatic formal verification is that it's automatic --- minimal human labor and expertise should be needed to get useful results and counterexamples. BDD(binary decision diagram)-based approaches have promised to allow automatic verification of complex, real systems. For large classes of problems, however, (including many distributed protocols, multiprocessor systems, and network architectures) this promise has yet to be fulfilled. Indeed, the few successes have required extensive time and effort from sophisticated researchers in the field. Clearly, techniques are needed that are more sophisticated than the obvious direct implementation of theoretical results. This thesis addresses that need, emphasizing an application domain that has been particularly difficult for BDD-based methods --- high-level models of systems or distributed protocols --- rather than gate-level descriptions of circuits. Additionally, the emphasis is on providing useful debugging information for the...

Citations