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An Improvement in Formal Verification Gerard J. Holzmann Doron Peled ATT Bell Laboratories Murray Hill, New Jersey 07974 ABSTRACT Critical safety and liveness properties of a concurrent system can often be proven with the help of a reachability analysis of a finite state model. This type of analysis is usually implemented as a depth−first search of the product state−space of all components in the system, with each (finite state) component modeling the behavior of one asynchronously executing process. Formal verification is achieved by coupling the depth−first search with a method for identifying those states or sequences of states that violate the correct- ness requirements. It is well known, however, that an exhaustive depth−first search of this type performs redundant work. The redundancy is caused by the many possible interleavings of inde- pendent actions in a concurrent system. Few of these interleavings can alter the truth or falsity of the correctness properties being studied. The standard depth−first search algorithm can be modified to track additional information about the interleavings that have already been inspected, and use this information to avoid the exploration of redundant interleavings. Care must be taken to perform the reductions in such a way that the capability to prove both safety and liveness properties is fully pre- served. Not all known methods have this property.