2009 | OriginalPaper | Chapter
Verification of Parameterized Systems with Combinations of Abstract Domains
Authors : Naghmeh Ghafari, Arie Gurfinkel, Richard Trefler
Published in: Formal Techniques for Distributed Systems
Publisher: Springer Berlin Heidelberg
Activate our intelligent search to find suitable subject content or patents.
Select sections of text to find matching patents with Artificial Intelligence. powered by
Select sections of text to find additional relevant content using AI-assisted search. powered by
We present a framework for verifying safety properties of parameterized systems. Our framework is based on a combination of Abstract Interpretation and a backward-reachability algorithm. A parameterized system is a family of systems in which
n
processes execute the same program concurrently. The problem of parameterized verification is to decide whether for all values of
n
the system with
n
processes is correct. Despite well-known difficulties in analyzing such systems, they are of significant interest as they can describe a wide range of protocols from mutual-exclusion to transactional memory. We assume that neither the number of processes nor their statespaces are bounded a priori. Hence, each process may be
infinte-state
. Our key contribution is an abstract domain in which each element (a) represents the lower bound on the number of processes at a control location and (b) employs a numeric abstract domain to capture arithmetic relations between variables of the processes. We also provide an extrapolation operator for the domain to guarantee sound termination of the backward-reachability algorithm. Our abstract domain is generic enough to be instantiated by different well-known numeric abstract domains such as octagons and polyhedra. This makes the framework applicable to a wide range of parameterized systems.