The Power of Proofs: New Algorithms for Timed Automata Model Checking (with Appendix)
This work addresses model-checking challenges for timed automata, a domain-specific problem in formal verification, with incremental improvements through derived rules.
The paper tackles the problem of model checking for timed automata by introducing the first algorithm for an expressive modal mu-calculus, which can express all of TCTL, and reports performance results from an implementation compared to the UPPAAL tool.
This paper presents the first model-checking algorithm for an expressive modal mu-calculus over timed automata, $L^{\mathit{rel}, \mathit{af}}_{ν,μ}$, and reports performance results for an implementation. This mu-calculus contains extended time-modality operators and can express all of TCTL. Our algorithmic approach uses an "on-the-fly" strategy based on proof search as a means of ensuring high performance for both positive and negative answers to model-checking questions. In particular, a set of proof rules for solving model-checking problems are given and proved sound and complete; we encode our algorithm in these proof rules and model-check a property by constructing a proof (or showing none exists) using these rules. One noteworthy aspect of our technique is that we show that verification performance can be improved with \emph{derived rules}, whose correctness can be inferred from the more primitive rules on which they are based. In this paper, we give the basic proof rules underlying our method, describe derived proof rules to improve performance, and compare our implementation of this model checker to the UPPAAL tool.