Parallel Program Verification Using BMC

The paper describes a research tool for studying the applicability of bounded model checking techniques to verifying asynchronous software. A simple programming language, PROMELAb, is introduced and an operational semantics for it is defined. The language is basically a subset of PROMELA, the input language of the SPIN model checker. The basic idea is to study techniques for improving the efficiency of bounded model checking techniques for parallel software by exploiting the potential concurrency in executing asynchronous programs. As a first step, a translation from a PROMELAb program and an execution bound to a propositional formula is devised such that the models of the formula capture exactly the bounded executions of the program. The translation allows the analysis of both interleaving and step executions. It is shown how it can be used to check bounded reachability properties and how the approach extends to handling safety properties. Techniques for optimizing the encoding are also discussed.