[Lrde Annonce] New publication: Explicit State Model Checking with Generalized Büchi and Rabin Automata

I'm happy to announce that the following article has been accepted for publication in the International SPIN Symposium on Model Checking of Software (SPIN'17), to be held in Santa Barbara on July 13-14, 2017. « Explicit State Model Checking with Generalized Büchi and Rabin Automata » Vincent Bloemen¹ Alexandre Duret-Lutz² Jaco van de Pol¹ ¹ University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands ² LRDE / EPITA, Le Kremlin-Bicêtre, France Abstract: In the automata theoretic approach to explicit state LTL model checking, the synchronized product of the model and an automaton that represents the negated formula is checked for emptiness. In practice, a (transition-based generalized) Büchi automaton (TGBA) is used for this procedure. This paper investigates whether using a more general form of acceptance, namely transition-based generalized Rabin automata (TGRAs), improves the model checking procedure. TGRAs can have significantly fewer states than TGBAs, however the corresponding emptiness checking procedure is more involved. With recent advances in probabilistic model checking and LTL to TGRA translators, it is only natural to ask whether checking a TGRA directly is more advantageous in practice. We designed a multi-core TGRA checking algorithm and performed experiments on a subset of the models and formulas from the 2015 Model Checking Contest. We observed that our algorithm can be used to replace a TGBA checking algorithm without losing performance. In general, we found little to no improvement by checking TGRAs directly. http://www.lrde.epita.fr/dload/papers/bloemen.17.spin.pdf -- Alexandre Duret-Lutz