Simple on-the-fly automatic verification of linear temporal logic

We present a tableau-based construction for obtaining an automaton from a temporal logic formula in an “on-the-fly” fashion. That is, the automaton can be constructed simultaneously with, and guided by, the generation of the model. In particular, it is possible to detect that a property does not hold by only constructing part of the model and of the automaton. The algorithm can also be used to check the validity of a temporal logic assertion. Although the general problem is PSPACE-complete, experiments show that our algorithm performs quite well on the temporal formulas typically encountered in verification. While basing linear-time temporal logic modelchecking upon a transformation to automata is not new, the details of how to do this efficiently, and in “on-the-fly” fashion have never been given.