Abstract interpretation of programs for modelbased debugging

Developing model-based automatic debugging strategies has been an active research area for sev-eral years. We present a model-based debug-ging approach that is based on Abstract Interpre-tation, a technique borrowed from program analy-sis. The Abstract Interpretation mechanism is inte-grated with a classical model-based reasoning en-gine. We test the approach on sample programs and provide the first experimental comparison with earlier models used for debugging. The results show that the Abstract Interpretation based model provides more precise explanations than previous models or standard non-model based approaches.