Automatic software model checking via constraint logic

This paper proposes the use of constraint logic to perform model checking of imperative, infinite-state programs. We present a semantics-preserving translation from an imperative language with recursive procedures and heap-allocated mutable data structures into constraint logic. The constraint logic formulation provides a clean way to reason about the behavior and correctness of the original program. In addition, it enables the use of existing constraint logic implementations to perform bounded software model checking, using a combination of symbolic reasoning and explicit path exploration. (C) 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved