Verifying synchronous reactive systems using lazy abstraction

Kumar Madhukar, Mandayam K. Srivas, Björn Wachter, Daniel Kroening, Ravindra Metta

Abstract: Embedded software systems are frequently modeled as a set of synchronous reactive processes. The transitions performed by the processes are given as sequential, atomic code blocks. Most existing verifiers flatten such programs into a global transition system, to be able to apply off-the-shelf verification methods. However, this monolithic approach fails to exploit the lock-step execution of the processes, severely limiting scalability. We present a novel formal verification technique that analyses synchronous concurrency explicitly rather than encoding it. We present a variant of Lazy Abstraction with Interpolants (LAwI), a technique successfully used in software verification, and tailor it to synchronous reactive concurrency. We exploit the synchronous communication structure by fixing an execution schedule, circumventing the exponential blow-up of state space caused by simulating synchronous behaviour by means of interleavings. The technique is implemented in Sympara, a verification tool for synchronous reactive systems. To evaluate the effectiveness of our technique, we compare Sympara with Bounded Model Checking and k-induction, and a LAWI-based verifier for multi-threaded (asynchronous) software. On several realistic examples Sympara outperforms the other tools by an order of magnitude.