Compositional Model Checking

Modern software, which is often concurrent and distributed, must be extremely reliable and correct. Model checking [3] is a technique for automating high-quality assurance of software. Given a finite state model of a system and a property, usually expressed as an automaton or a temporal logic formula, model checking systematically goes through all the possible system behaviors and checks them for conformance against the property. Despite its successes, the technique still suffers from the state explosion problem, which refers to the worst-case exponential growth of a program’s state space with the number of concurrent components. Compositional verification techniques have shown promise in addressing this problem, by breaking-up the global verification of a program into local, more manageable, verification of its individual components.