A state graph manipulator tool for real-time system specification and verification

Abstract

The current technology of verification engineering requires well-trained personnel in logic and automata theory, who carefully tune their verification packages, to tame the well-known state-space explosion problem. Research has resulted in a large number of techniques for reducing the system state-space, such as symmetry-based reductions, partial-order semantics, bisimulation equivalences, etc. To let more people benefit from the technology of computer-aided verification even with little training in the related theories, a new tool called State-Graph Manipulator (SGM) was developed to package various sophisticated verification techniques as manipulators on state-graphs as high-level data-objects. An example user session of SGM is discussed and the results presented. Experiments conducted using SGM show how the tool, when used by a system designer can increase verification efficiency and scalability.