Performance Improvements of Behavior Protocol Checking

One of the serious problems of model checking is the state explosion problem. It hinders the use of model checking methods as everyday debugging tool. Using behavior protocol as a component specification mechanism also yields this problem. As the component compatibility verification using behavior protocols is based on exhaustive state space traversing, the enormous size of the state space in some cases causes not only very long time required to perform the verification (in the order of hours or days), but also consumes a substantial amount of memory. Therefore, suitable methods for both state space representation and its traversing are required. In this paper, we propose new state identification technique based on bitfields that has significantly decreased both time and memory requirements of behavior protocol checking.