We are happy to announce that the following paper has been accepted for publication at the 9th international symposium on Automated Technology for Verification and Analysis (ATVA'11) that will take place in Taipei, Taiwan, on October 11-14, 2011.

Self-Loop Aggregation Product — A New Hybrid Approach to On-the-Fly LTL Model Checking

A. Duret-Lutz (1) K. Klai (2) D. Poitrenaud (3) Y. Thierry-Mieg. (3)

(1) Laboratoire de Recherche et Développement de l'Epita (LRDE) (2) Laboratoire d'Informatique de Paris-Nord (LIPN) (3) Laboratoire d'Informatique de Paris 6 (LIP6)

http://publis.lrde.epita.fr/201110-ATVA

We present the Self-Loop Aggregation Product (SLAP), a new hybrid technique that replaces the synchronized product used in the automata-theoretic approach for LTL model checking. The proposed product is an explicit graph of aggregates (symbolic sets of states) that can be interpreted as a Büchi automata. The criterion used by SLAP to aggregate states from the Kripke structure is based on the analysis of self-loops that occur in the Büchi automaton expressing the property to verify. Our hybrid approach allows on the one hand to use classical emptiness-check algorithms and build the graph on-the-fly, and on the other hand, to have a compact encoding of the state space thanks to the symbolic representation of the aggregates. Our experiments show that this technique often outperforms other existing (hybrid or fully symbolic) approaches.