Tree-Like Counterexamples in Model Checking (2002)
| Venue: | In Proceedings of the 17 th Annual IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science (LICS’02 |
| Citations: | 37 - 3 self |
BibTeX
@INPROCEEDINGS{Clarke02tree-likecounterexamples,
author = {Edmund Clarke and Yuan Lu and Broadcom Com and Helmut Veith and Somesh Jha},
title = {Tree-Like Counterexamples in Model Checking},
booktitle = {In Proceedings of the 17 th Annual IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science (LICS’02},
year = {2002},
publisher = {IEEE Computer Society}
}
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Abstract
Counterexamples for specification violations provide engineers with important debugging information. Although counterexamples are considered one of the main advantages of model checking, state-of the art model checkers are restricted to relatively simple counterexamples, and surprisingly little research effort has been put into counterexamples. In this paper, we introduce a new general framework for counterexamples. The paper has three main contributions: (i) We determine the general form of ACTL counterexamples. To this end, we investigate the notion of counterexample and show that a large class of temporal logics beyond ACTL admits counterexamples with a simple tree-like transition relation. We show that the existence of tree-like counterexamples is related to a universal fragment of extended branching time logic based on ! regular temporal operators. (ii) We present new symbolic algorithms to generate tree-like counterexamples for ACTL specifications. (iii) Based on tree-like counterexamples we extend the abstraction refinement methodology developed recently by Clarke et al. (CAV'2000) to full ACTL. This demonstrates the conceptual simplicity and elegance of tree-like counterexamples.
