Abstract
The use of symmetry to alleviate state-explosion problems during model-checking has become a important research topic. This paper investigates several problems which are important to techniques exploiting symmetry. The most important of these problems is the orbit problem. We prove that the orbit problem is equivalent to an important problem in computational group theory which is at least as hard as the graph isomorphism but not known to be NP-complete. This paper also shows classes of commonly occurring groups for which the orbit problem is easy. Some methods of deriving symmetry for a shared variable model of concurrent programs are also investigated. Experimental results providing evidence of reduction in state space by using symmetry are also provided.
Clarke and Jha's research was supported in part by NSF Grant no. CCR-8722633 and SRC Contract 92-DJ-294; Emerson's research was supported in part by NSF grant no. CCR-941-5496 and SRC grant no. 388-DP-97; Sistla's research was supported in part by NSF grants CCR-9623229 and CCR-9633536.
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Clarke, E.M., Emerson, E.A., Jha, S., Sistla, A.P. (1998). Symmetry reductions in model checking. In: Hu, A.J., Vardi, M.Y. (eds) Computer Aided Verification. CAV 1998. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1427. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0028741
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0028741
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