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Guard-based partial-order reduction

  • SPIN 2013
  • Published:
International Journal on Software Tools for Technology Transfer Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

This paper aims at making partial-order reduction independent of the modeling language. To this end, we present a guard-based method which is a general-purpose implementation of the stubborn set method. We approach the implementation through so-called necessary enabling sets and do-not-accord sets, and give an algorithm suitable for an abstract model checking interface. We also introduce necessary disabling sets and heuristics to produce smaller stubborn sets and thus better reduction at low costs. We explore the effect of these methods using an implementation in the model checker LTSmin. We experiment with partial-order reduction on a number of Promela models, on benchmarks from the BEEM database in the DVE language, and with several with LTL properties. The efficiency of the heuristic algorithm is established by a comparison to the subset-minimal Deletion algorithm and the simple closure algorithm. We also compare our results to the Spin model checker. While the reductions take longer, they are consistently better than Spin ’s ample set and often surpass the upper bound for the process-based ample sets, established empirically earlier on BEEM models.

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Notes

  1. http://fmt.cs.utwente.nl/tools/ltsmin/.

  2. http://spinroot.com.

  3. http://www.albertolluch.com/research/promelamodels.

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Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Antti Valmari, Patrice Godefroid and Dragan Bošnački for useful discussions and advice.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Formal Methods in Systems Engineering, Vienna University of Technology, Vienna, Austria

    Alfons Laarman

  2. Formal Methods and Tools, University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands

    Alfons Laarman, Elwin Pater & Jaco van de Pol

  3. Department of Mathematics, Tampere University of Technology, Tampere, Finland

    Henri Hansen

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  1. Alfons Laarman
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  2. Elwin Pater
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  3. Jaco van de Pol
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  4. Henri Hansen
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Correspondence to Alfons Laarman.

Additional information

Alfons Laarman: Sup. by Austrian National Research Network S11403-N23 (RiSE) of the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) and by the Vienna Science and Technology Fund (WWTF) through grant VRG11-005.

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Laarman, A., Pater, E., van de Pol, J. et al. Guard-based partial-order reduction. Int J Softw Tools Technol Transfer 18, 427–448 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10009-014-0363-9

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