Abstract Behavior Protocols Verification: Fighting State Explosion

A typical problem formal verification faces is the size of the model of a system being verified. Even for a small system, the state space of the model tends to grow exponentially (state explosion). In this paper, we present a new representation of state spaces suitable for implementing operations upon behavior protocols of software components [1]. The proposed representation is linear in length of the source behavior protocol. By trading space for time, it allows handling behavior protocols of “practical size”. As a proof of concept, two versions of a verification tool based on the proposed technique are discussed