Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Similarity-Based Search For Model Checking: A Pilot Study With Java Pathfinder, Elmin Ibrahimov, Jixing Wang, Zhiquan Zhou

Dr Zhiquan Zhou

When a model checker cannot explore the entire state space because of limited resources, model checking becomes a kind of testing with an attempt to find a failure (violation of properties) quickly. We consider two state sequences in model checking: (i) the sequence in which new states are generated, and (ii) the sequence in which the states generated in sequence (i) are checked for property violation. We observe that neighboring states in sequence (i) often have similarities in certain ways. Based on this observation we propose a search strategy, which generates sequence (ii) in such a way that similar states …