In this paper we investigate to which extent a very simple and natural
"reachability as deducibility" approach, originated in the research in formal
methods in security, is applicable to the automated verification of large
classes of infinite state and parameterized systems. The approach is based on
modeling the reachability between (parameterized) states as deducibility
between suitable encodings of states by formulas of first-order predicate
logic. The verification of a safety property is reduced to a pure logical
problem of finding a countermodel for a first-order formula. The later task is
delegated then to the generic automated finite model building procedures. In
this paper we first establish the relative completeness of the finite
countermodel finding method (FCM) for a class of parameterized linear arrays of
finite automata. The method is shown to be at least as powerful as known
methods based on monotonic abstraction and symbolic backward reachability.
Further, we extend the relative completeness of the approach and show that it
can solve all safety verification problems which can be solved by the
traditional regular model checking.Comment: 17 pages, slightly different version of the paper is submitted to
TACAS 201
