Generalized Reversible Rules

A generalized notion of reversible rules is presented in this paper to perform state reduction in automatic formal veriication. The key idea is that some of the transition rules in a design may be invertible, and therefore, they can be used to collapse subgraphs into abstract states, thereby reducing the state explosion problem. This paper improves upon previous work to achieve the following goals: 1) the deenition of reversible rules is simpliied so that it is easy to apply the reduction method in practice; 2) the deenition is generalized to allow more reduction in the size of the state graph. The reduction algorithm can be combined with symmetry reduction techniques , for veriication of invariants, deadlock-freedom, and stuttering-invariant temporal properties.