There is, I think, something ethereal about i —the square root of minus one. I remember first hearing about it at school. It seemed an odd beast at that time—an intruder hovering on the edge of reality.

Usually familiarity dulls this sense of the bizarre, but in the case of i it was the reverse: over the years the sense of its surreal nature intensified. It seemed that it was impossible to write mathematics that described the real world in …

I and i

Our growing dependence on increasingly complex computer and software systems necessitates the development of formalisms, techniques, and tools for assessing functional properties of these systems. One such technique that has emerged in the last twenty years is model checking, which systematically (and automatically) checks whether a model of a given system satisfies a desired property such as deadlock freedom, invariants, and request-response properties. This automated technique for verification and debugging has developed into a mature and widely used approach with many applications. Principles of Model Checking offers a comprehensive introduction to model checking that is not only a text suitable for classroom use but also a valuable reference for researchers and practitioners in the field. The book begins with the basic principles for modeling concurrent and communicating systems, introduces different classes of properties (including safety and liveness), presents the notion of fairness, and provides automata-based algorithms for these properties. It introduces the temporal logics LTL and CTL, compares them, and covers algorithms for verifying these logics, discussing real-time systems as well as systems subject to random phenomena. Separate chapters treat such efficiency-improving techniques as abstraction and symbolic manipulation. The book includes an extensive set of examples (most of which run through several chapters) and a complete set of basic results accompanied by detailed proofs. Each chapter concludes with a summary, bibliographic notes, and an extensive list of exercises of both practical and theoretical nature.

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Principles of Model Checking

物件導向軟體之架構(Object-Oriented Software Construction)探討

Model Checking

SPIN is an efficient verification system for models of distributed software systems. It has been used to detect design errors in applications ranging from high-level descriptions of distributed algorithms to detailed code for controlling telephone exchanges. The paper gives an overview of the design and structure of the verifier, reviews its theoretical foundation, and gives an overview of significant practical applications.

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The model checker SPIN

The SPIN Model Checker is used for both teaching software verification techniques, and for validating large scale applications. The growing number of users has created a need for a more comprehensive user guide and a standard reference manual that describes the most recent version of the tool. This book fills that need. SPIN is used in over 40 countries. The offical SPIN web site, spinroot.com receives between 2500 and 3000 hits per day. It has been estimated that up to three-quarters of the $400 billion spent annually to hire programmers in the United States is ultimately spent on debugging

The SPIN Model Checker: Primer and Reference Manual

Part 1 Basic: introduction protocol structure error control flow control. Part 2 Specification and modeling: validation models correctness requirements protocol design finite state machines. Part 3 Conformance testing synthesis and validation: conformance testing protocol synthesis protocol validation. Part 4 Design tools: a protocol simulator a protocol validator using the validator.

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Design and validation of computer protocols

The SPIN Model Checker

We describe a family of optimizations implemented in a translation from a linear temporal logic to Buchi automata. Such optimized automata can enhance the efficiency of model checking, as practiced in tools such as SPIN. Some of our optimizations are applied during preprocessing of temporal formulas, while other key optimizations are applied directly to the resulting Buchi automata independent of how they arose. Among these latter optimizations we apply a variant of fair simulation reduction based on color refinement. We have implemented our optimizations in a translation of an extension to LTL described in [Ete99]. Inspired by this work, a subset of the optimizations outlined here has been added to a recent version of SPIN. Both implementations begin with an underlying algorithm of [GPVW95]. We describe the results of tests we have conducted, both to see how the optimizations improve the sizes of resulting automata, as well as to see how the smaller sizes for the automata affect the running time of SPIN's explicit state model checking algorithm. Our translation is available via a web-server which includes a GUI that depicts the resulting automata: http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/what/spin/eqltl.html

Gerard J. Holzmann

Papers

The model checker SPIN

The SPIN Model Checker: Primer and Reference Manual

Design and validation of computer protocols

The SPIN Model Checker

Optimizing Büchi Automata