First Attempts to Combine Symmetry Reduction and Heuristic Search for Error Detection.pdfVIP

First Attempts to Combine Symmetry Reduction and Heuristic Search for Error Detection Alb erto Lluch Lafuente Institut fur Informatik Alb ertLudwigsUniversitat Freiburg lafuenteinformatikunifreiburgde Abstract The state explosion problem is the main limitation of mo del checking Symme tries in the system b eing veried can b e exploited in order to avoid this problem A symmetry relation on the system is dened which induces a semantically equivalent quotient system of smaller size On the other hand heuristic search algorithms can b e applied to improve error detection Such algorithms use heuristic functions to guide the exploration Bestrst is used for accelerating the search while A guarantees optimal error trails if combined with admissible estimates We analyze some asp ects of combining b oth approaches presenting an admissible estimate that allows A to provide optimal counterexamples when combined with symmetry reduction Exp erimental results are also included Technichal Rep ort No February Intro duction Mo del checking is a formal automated metho d for the verication of hardware and software systems Roughly sp eaking the state space of the system is explored in order to check whether the sp ecication holds or not A negative answer is usually represented by a counterexample that violates the sp ecication The main drawback of mo del checking is the state explosion pr oblem The size of the state space can b e large enough to exhaust the available space and time resources Hence the main research eorts in this area are fo cused on mitigating this problem Symmetries in a system can b e exploited in order to reduce the size of the state space One way to achieve th