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Domain Types: Abstract-Domain Selection Based on Variable Usage

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Hardware and Software: Verification and Testing (HVC 2013)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 8244))

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Abstract

The success of software model checking depends on finding an appropriate abstraction of the program to verify. The choice of the abstract domain and the analysis configuration is currently left to the user, who may not be familiar with the tradeoffs and performance details of the available abstract domains. We introduce the concept of domain types, which classify the program variables into types that are more fine-grained than standard declared types (e.g., ‘int’ and ‘long’) to guide the selection of an appropriate abstract domain for a model checker. Our implementation on top of an existing verification framework determines the domain type for each variable in a pre-analysis step, based on the usage of variables in the program, and then assigns each variable to an abstract domain. Based on a series of experiments on a comprehensive set of verification tasks from international verification competitions, we demonstrate that the choice of the abstract domain per variable (we consider one explicit and one symbolic domain) can substantially improve the verification in terms of performance and precision.

A preliminary version was published as Technical Report MIP-1303 in May 2013 [3].

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Passau, Germany

    Sven Apel, Dirk Beyer, Karlheinz Friedberger & Alexander von Rhein

  2. Middlesex University, London, UK

    Franco Raimondi

Authors
  1. Sven Apel
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  2. Dirk Beyer
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  3. Karlheinz Friedberger
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  4. Franco Raimondi
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  5. Alexander von Rhein
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, CSE #4645 - ACAL Lab, University of Michigan, 2260 Hayward Avenue, 48109-2121, Ann Arbor, MI, USA

    Valeria Bertacco

  2. Inventors for the Digital World, inria, Bat C, Burean C213, Campus Universitaire de Beaulieu, 35042, Rennes Cedex, France

    Axel Legay

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Apel, S., Beyer, D., Friedberger, K., Raimondi, F., von Rhein, A. (2013). Domain Types: Abstract-Domain Selection Based on Variable Usage. In: Bertacco, V., Legay, A. (eds) Hardware and Software: Verification and Testing. HVC 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8244. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-03077-7_18

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-03077-7_18

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-03076-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-03077-7

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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