Computing Property-Preserving Behaviour Abstractions from Trace Reductions

Weakly continuation-closed abstractions are known to preserve properties satisfied within fairness, i.e. linear-time temporal properties under an abstract notion of fairness. Being defined on the complete behaviour of a distributed system, weakly continuation-closed abstractions require, in principle, an exhaustive state-space construction prior to abstraction. Constructing the state-space of a practically relevant specification exhaustively, however, is usually unfeasible. Based on the notion of traces, i.e. certain equivalence classes of behaviours, we define trace reductions. Trace reductions are a particular partial-order reduction based on the persistent-set selective search technique. We show that a trace reduction can be used on behalf of the complete behaviour of a distributed system in order to compute abstractions as well as to check whether the abstractions are weakly continuation-closed. Thus, trace reductions allow us to overcome the requirement of an exhaustive state-space construction prior to abstraction