Checking Timed Bisimilarity with Virtual Clocks
This addresses a verification problem for time-critical reactive systems, offering a more efficient method for a previously undecidable or impractical task, though it is incremental as it builds on zone graphs.
The paper tackles the lack of practical tools for automated timed bisimilarity checking in timed automata by proposing a new representation using virtual clocks, resulting in a construction that is significantly smaller than region graphs on average.
Timed automata are a widely used formalism for specifying the discrete-state/continuous-time behavior of time-critical reactive systems. For the fundamental verification problem of comparing two timed automata, it has been shown that timed trace equivalence is undecidable, while timed bisimulation is decidable. The corresponding decidability proof uses region graphs, a finite but space-consuming characterization of timed automata semantics. Most verification tools use zone graphs instead, a symbolic and, on average, more space-efficient representation of timed automata semantics. However, zone graphs provide correct results only for those verification tasks that are reducible to reachability problems, and are too imprecise for timed bisimilarity checking. To the best of our knowledge, there is currently no practical tool for automated timed bisimilarity checking. In this paper, we propose a new representation of timed automata semantics that extends zone graphs by so-called virtual clocks. Our zone-based construction is, on average, significantly smaller than the corresponding region graph representation. We also present experimental results obtained by applying our tool implementation to timed automata models, which are often used to evaluate timed automata analysis techniques.