Practical Efficient Modular Linear-Time Model-Checking

Abstract. This paper shows how the modular structure of composite systems can guide the state-space exploration in explicit-state linear-time model-checking and make it more efficient in practice. Given a composite system where every module has input and output variables — and variables of different modules can be connected — a total ordering according to which variables are generated is determined, through heuristics based on graph-theoretical analysis of the modular structure. The technique is shown to outperform standard exploration techniques (that do not take the modular structure information into account) by several orders of magnitude in experiments with Spin models of MTL formulas.