Automated environment generation for software model checking

Abstract

A key problem in model checking open systems is environment modeling (i.e., representing the behavior of the execution context of the system under analysis). Software systems are fundamentally open since their behavior is dependent on patterns of invocation of system components and values defined outside the system but referenced within the system. Whether reasoning about the behavior of whole programs or about program components, an abstract model of the environment can be essential in enabling sufficiently precise yet tractable verification. In this paper, we describe an approach to generating environments of Java program fragments. This approach integrated formally specified assumptions about environment behavior with sound abstractions of environment implementations to form a model of the environment. The approach is implemented in the Bandera environment generator (BEG) which we describe along with our experience using BEG to reason about properties of several nontrivial concurrent Java programs.