Compositional Entailment Checking for a Fragment of Separation Logic

We present a (semi-)decision procedure for checking entailment between separation logic formulas with inductive predicates specifying complex data structures corresponding to finite nesting of various kinds of linked lists: acyclic or cyclic, singly or doubly linked, skip lists, etc. The decision procedure is compositional in the sense that it reduces the problem of checking entailment between two arbitrary formulas to the problem of checking entailment between a formula and an atom. Subsequently, in case the atom is a predicate, we reduce the entailment to testing membership of a tree derived from the formula in the language of a tree automaton derived from the predicate. We implemented this decision procedure and tested it successfully on verification conditions obtained from programs using singly and doubly linked nested lists as well as skip lists.