A Fully Parallel Approach of Model Checking Via Probe Machine

Abstract

Model checking is a verification technique that explores all possible system states in a brute-force manner. However, the state space can be extremely large for many practical systems and the verification time grows exponentially with the size of systems. It is a major limitation for state-space search algorithms of model checking. This paper presents a novel approach to perform Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) and Computation Tree Logic (CTL) model checking by using the connective probe machine, which is a fully parallel computing model. Our state-space search algorithm is based on the semantics of CTL properties and we design transformation algorithms to transform the model of a system into the structure that can run on the existing probe machine. We propose another approach to find multiple accepting cycles in linear time, which greatly shortens the verification time of LTL model checking. Compared to the traditional model checker, our approach can find multiple counterexamples according to the given property, which can trace as many system defects as possible. Simultaneously, it can greatly reduce the verification time for systems with large state spaces. We develop a model checker called MC2PROBE based on our approach and prove the feasibility and efficiency of our checker by experiments.