Compositional model checking

Abstract: "We describe a method for reducing the complexity of temporal logic model checking in systems composed of many parallel processes. Thegoal is to check properties of the components of a system and then deduce globalproperties from these local properties. The main difficulty with this type of approach is that local properties are often not preserved at the global level. We present a general framework for using additional interface processes to model the environment for a component. These interface processes are typically much simpler than the full environment of the component. By composing a component with its interface processes and then checking properties of this composition, we can guarantee that these properties will be preserved at the global level. We give two example compositional systems based on the logic CTL.