Model checking is a powerful technique for verification of concurrent systems. One of the potential problems with this technique is state space explosion. There are two ways in which one could cope with state explosion: reducing the search space and searching less space. Most of the existing algorithms are based on the first approach.
One of the successful approach for reducing search space uses Binary Decision Diagrams (BDDs) to represent the system. Systems with a large number of states (of the order of 5 x 10 ) have been thus verified. But there are limitations to this heuristic approach. Even systems of reasonable complexity have many more states. Also, the BDD approach might fail even on some simple systems. In this paper we propose the use of parallelism to extend the applicability of BDDs in model checking. In particular we present very fast algorithms for model checking that employ BDDs. The algorithms presented are much faster than the best known previous algorithms. We also describe searching less space as an attractive approach to model checking. In this paper we demonstrate the power of this approach. We also suggest the use of randomization in the design of model checking algorithms
