Variability Abstraction and Refinement for Game-based Lifted Model Checking of full CTL (Extended Version)
This work addresses the computational cost issue for researchers and practitioners in formal verification, but it is incremental as it builds on existing variability abstraction methods.
The authors tackled the configuration space explosion problem in lifted model checking of full CTL by proposing a game-based approach for variability abstraction and refinement, resulting in an iterative framework that reuses definite results and refines only where indefinite results exist.
Variability models allow effective building of many custom model variants for various configurations. Lifted model checking for a variability model is capable of verifying all its variants simultaneously in a single run by exploiting the similarities between the variants. The computational cost of lifted model checking still greatly depends on the number of variants (the size of configuration space), which is often huge. One of the most promising approaches to fighting the configuration space explosion problem in lifted model checking are variability abstractions. In this work, we define a novel game-based approach for variability-specific abstraction and refinement for lifted model checking of the full CTL, interpreted over 3-valued semantics. We propose a direct algorithm for solving a 3-valued (abstract) lifted model checking game. In case the result of model checking an abstract variability model is indefinite, we suggest a new notion of refinement, which eliminates indefinite results. This provides an iterative incremental variability-specific abstraction and refinement framework, where refinement is applied only where indefinite results exist and definite results from previous iterations are reused.