Divide, Abstract, and Model-Check

The applicability of model-checking is often restricted by the size of the considered system. To overcome this limitation, a number of techniques have been investigated. Prominent among these are data independence, abstraction, and compositionality. This paper presents a methodology based on deductive reasoning and model-checking which combines these techniques. As we show, the combination of abstraction and compositionality gives a significant added value to each of them in isolation. We substantiate the approach proving safety of a sliding window protocol of window size 16 using Spin and PVS.