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On the complexity of verifying concurrent transition systems

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CONCUR '97: Concurrency Theory (CONCUR 1997)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 1243))

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Abstract

In implementation verification, we check that an implementation is correct with respect to a specification by checking whether the behaviors of a transition system that models the program's implementation correlate with the behaviors of a transition system that models its specification. In this paper, we investigate the effect of concurrency on the complexity of implementation verification. We consider trace-based and tree-based approaches to the verification of concurrent transition systems, with and without fairness. Our results show that in almost all cases the complexity of the problem is exponentially harder than that of the sequential case. Thus, as in the model-checking verification methodology, the state-explosion problem cannot be avoided.

Part of this research was done in Bell Laboratories during the DIMACS special year on Logic and Algorithms.

Supported in part by the ONR YIP award N00014-95-1-0520, by the NSF CAREER award CCR-9501708, by the NSF grant CCR-9504469, by the AFOSR contract F49620-93-1-0056, by the ARO MURI grant DAAH-04-96-1-0341, by the ARPA grant NAG2-892, and by the SRC contract 95-DC-324.036.

Supported in part by the NSF grant CCR-9628400.

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Antoni Mazurkiewicz Józef Winkowski

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Harel, D., Kupferman, O., Vardi, M.Y. (1997). On the complexity of verifying concurrent transition systems. In: Mazurkiewicz, A., Winkowski, J. (eds) CONCUR '97: Concurrency Theory. CONCUR 1997. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1243. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-63141-0_18

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-63141-0_18

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-69188-4

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