An SMT Approach to Bounded Model Checking of Design in State Transition Matrix

Abstract

State Transition Matrix (STM) is a table-based modeling language that has been frequently used in industry for specifying behavior of distributed systems. Functional correctness of a STM design (i.e., a design written in STM) could usually be expressed as invariant properties. In this paper, we first present a formalization of the static and dynamic aspects of a STM design. Consequentially, based on this formalization, we investigate a symbolic encoding approach for STM design, through which the design could be bounded model checked wrt. invariant properties by using Satisfiability Modulo Theories (SMT) solving technique. We have built a prototype implementation of the proposed encoding and the state-of-the-art SMT solver -- Yices is used in our experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of our approach.