I am happy to announce that the following paper has been accepted in
the Conference on Formal Techniques for Distributed Objects,
Components and Systems (FORTE'15), to be held in Grenoble on June 2-5, 2015.
Extending Testing Automata to All LTL
Ala Eddine Ben Salem
LRDE, EPITA, Le Kremlin-Bicêtre, France, ala(a)lrde.epita.fr
Abstract:
An alternative to the traditional Büchi Automata (BA), called Testing
Automata (TA) was proposed by Hansen et al. to improve the automata
theoretic approach to LTL model checking. In previous work, we proposed
an improvement of this alternative approach called TGTA (Generalized Testing
Automata). TGTA mixes features from both TA and TGBA (Generalized Büchi
Automata), without the disadvantage of TA, which is the second pass of the
emptiness check algorithm. We have shown that TGTA outperform TA, BA and
TGBA for explicit and symbolic LTL model checking. However, TA and TGTA
are less expressive than Büchi Automata since they are able to represent only
stutter-invariant LTL properties (LTL\X). In this paper, we show how to
extend Generalized Testing Automata (TGTA) to represent any LTL property.
This allows to extend the model checking approach based on this new form of
testing automata to check other kinds of properties and also other kinds of models
(such as Timed models). Implementation and experimentation of this extended
TGTA approach show that it is statistically more efficient than the Büchi Automata
approaches (BA and TGBA), for the explicit model checking of LTL properties.