Advanced Ramsey-Based Büchi Automata Inclusion Testing

Checking language inclusion between two nondeterministic Büchi automata

$\mathcal A$

and

$\mathcal B$

is computationally hard (PSPACE-complete). However, several approaches which are efficient in many practical cases have been proposed. We build on one of these, which is known as the

Ramsey-based approach

. It has recently been shown that the basic Ramsey-based approach can be drastically optimized by using powerful subsumption techniques, which allow one to prune the search-space when looking for counterexamples to inclusion. While previous works only used subsumption based on set inclusion or forward simulation on

$\mathcal A$

and

$\mathcal B$

, we propose the following new techniques: (1) A larger subsumption relation based on a combination of backward and forward simulations on

$\mathcal A$

and

$\mathcal B$

. (2) A method to additionally use forward simulation

between

$\mathcal A$

and

$\mathcal B$

. (3) Abstraction techniques that can speed up the computation and lead to early detection of counterexamples. The new algorithm was implemented and tested on automata derived from real-world model checking benchmarks, and on the Tabakov-Vardi random model, thus showing the usefulness of the proposed techniques.