Application of DES Theory to Verification of Software Components

Software model checking is typically applied to components of large systems. The assumption generation is the problem of finding the least restrictive environment in which the components satisfy a given safety property. There is an algorithm to compute the environment for properties given as a regular language. In this paper, we propose a general scheme for computing the assumption even for non-regular properties, and show the uniqueness of the least restrictive assumption for any class of languages. In general, dealing with non-regular languages may fall into undecidability of problems. We also show a method to compute assumptions based on visibly pushdown automata and their finite-state abstractions