Parameterized Tree Systems

Several recent works have considered parameterized verification, i.e. automatic verification of systems consisting of an arbitrary number of finite-state processes organized in a linear array. The aim of this paper is to extend these works by giving a simple and efficient method to prove safety properties for systems with treelike architectures. A process in the system is a finitestate automaton and a transition is performed jointly by a process and its parent and children processes. The method derives an over-approximation of the induced transition system, which allows the use of finite trees as symbolic representations of infinite sets of configurations. Compared to traditional methods for parameterized verification of systems with tree topologies, our method does not require the manipulation of tree transducers, hence its simplicity and efficiency. We have implemented a prototype which works well on several nontrivial tree-based protocols.