Symbolic Model Checking of Software

In hardware verification, the introduction of symbolic model checking has been considered a breakthrough, allowing to verify systems clearly out-of-reach of any explicit-state model checker. In contrast, in the verification of concurrent software, model checking is still predominantly performed by explicitstate model checkers such as SPIN. These methods gain much of their efficiency from state-reduction techniques such as partial-order reduction. To achieve a similar breakthrough for software as has been witnessed in moving to symbolic methods in hardware, efficient state-reduction techniques for symbolic methods must be developed. This paper introduces symbolic two-phase, a very promising technique for symbolic model checking of concurrent software. Experimental results show how this technique does not only improve the existing symbolic model checking approach, but it can be used to tackle problems that are not tractable using explicit-state methods.