The use of temporal logics has long been recognised as a fundamental approach
to the formal specification and verification of reactive systems. In this
paper, we take on the problem of automatically verifying a temporal property,
given by a CTL formula, for a given (possibly infinite-state) program. We
propose a method based on encoding the problem as a set of Horn constraints.
The method takes a program, modeled as a transition system, and a property
given by a CTL formula as input. It first generates a set of forall-exists
quantified Horn constraints and well-foundedness constraints by exploiting the
syntactic structure of the CTL formula. Then, the generated set of constraints
are solved by applying an off-the-shelf Horn constraints solving engine. The
program is said to satisfy the property if and only if the generated set of
constraints has a solution. We demonstrate the practical promises of the method
by applying it on a set of challenging examples. Although our method is based
on a generic Horn constraint solving engine, it is able to outperform
state-of-art methods specialised for CTL verification.Comment: In Proceedings HCVS2016, arXiv:1607.0403
