CGAAL: Distributed On-The-Fly ATL Model Checker with Heuristics

TL;DR

CGAAL is a novel distributed on-the-fly ATL model checker that employs heuristic search strategies, significantly outperforming existing tools like PRISM-games in efficiency on various case studies.

Contribution

The paper introduces CGAAL, a new distributed on-the-fly ATL model checker with multiple heuristic search strategies, improving speed and efficiency over existing tools.

Findings

CGAAL is often one to three orders of magnitude faster than PRISM-games.

Heuristic strategies like DHS, IHS, and LPS outperform traditional search methods.

CGAAL effectively encodes ATL using extended dependency graphs with negation edges.

Abstract

We present CGAAL, our efficient on-the-fly model checker for alternating-time temporal logic (ATL) on concurrent game structures (CGS). We present how our tool encodes ATL as extended dependency graphs with negation edges and employs the distributed on-the-fly algorithm by Dalsgaard et al. Our tool offers multiple novel search strategies for the algorithm, including DHS which is inspired by PageRank and uses the in-degree of configurations as a heuristic, IHS which estimates instability of assignment values, and LPS which estimates the distance to a state satisfying the constituent property using linear programming. CGS are input using our modelling language LCGS, where composition and synchronisation are easily described. We prove the correctness of our encoding, and our experiments show that our tool CGAAL is often one to three orders of magnitude faster than the popular tool PRISM-games on case studies from PRISM's documentation and among case studies we have developed. In our evaluation, we also compare and evaluate our search strategies, and find that our custom search strategies are often significantly faster than the usual breadth-first and depth-first search strategies.