Program Dependence Net and On-demand Slicing for Property Verification of Concurrent System and Software

TL;DR

This paper introduces a Program Dependence Net (PDNet) based on Petri net theory to improve property verification of concurrent systems by reducing state explosion through on-demand slicing, avoiding redundant computations.

Contribution

It proposes a unified PDNet model combining control flow and dependencies, and an on-demand slicing method for efficient model checking of concurrent software.

Findings

Significantly reduces verification computation cost.

Effectively captures relevant variable dependencies.

Validated advantages through implementation and experiments.

Abstract

When checking concurrent software using a finite-state model, we face a formidable state explosion problem. One solution to this problem is dependence-based program slicing, whose use can effectively reduce verification time. It is orthogonal to other model-checking reduction techniques. However, when slicing concurrent programs for model checking, there are conversions between multiple irreplaceable models, and dependencies need to be found for variables irrelevant to the verified property, which results in redundant computation. To resolve this issue, we propose a Program Dependence Net (PDNet) based on Petri net theory. It is a unified model that combines a control-flow structure with dependencies to avoid conversions. For reduction, we present a PDNet slicing method to capture the relevant variables' dependencies when needed. PDNet in verifying linear temporal logic and its on-demand slicing can be used to significantly reduce computation cost. We implement a model-checking tool based on PDNet and its on-demand slicing, and validate the advantages of our proposed methods.