Premium
LORETO: a tool for reducing state explosion in verification of LOTOS programs
Author(s) -
Barbuti Roberto,
De Francesco Nicoletta,
Santone Antonella,
Vaglini Gigliola
Publication year - 1999
Publication title -
software: practice and experience
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.437
H-Index - 70
eISSN - 1097-024X
pISSN - 0038-0644
DOI - 10.1002/(sici)1097-024x(199910)29:12<1123::aid-spe275>3.0.co;2-6
Subject(s) - computer science , programming language , semantics (computer science) , set (abstract data type) , automaton , state (computer science) , theoretical computer science , model checking , transformation (genetics) , operational semantics , transition system , biochemistry , chemistry , gene
LOTOS is a formal specification language for concurrent and distributed systems. Basic LOTOS is the version of LOTOS without value‐passing. A widely used approach to the verification of temporal properties is model checking. Often, in this approach the formal specification is translated into a labeled transition system on which formulae expressing properties are checked. A problem with this verification technique is state explosion: concurrent systems are often represented by automata with a prohibitive number of states. In this paper we show how, given a set ρ of actions, it is possible to automatically obtain for a Basic LOTOS program a reduced transition system to which only the arcs labeled by actions in ρ belong. The set ρ of actions plays a fundamental role in conjunction with a temporal logic defined by the authors in a previous paper: selective mu‐calculus. The reduced system with respect to ρ preserves the truth value of all selective mu‐calculus formulae with actions from the set ρ. We act at both syntactic and semantic levels. From a syntactic point of view, we define a set of transformation rules obtaining a smaller program. On the semantic side, we define a non‐standard semantics which dynamically reduces the transition system during generation. We present a tool implementing both the syntactic and the semantic reduction. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.