A New Approach to Stateless Model Checking of LTL Properties

Stateless model checking is an appropriate model checking technique for software verification. Existing stateless model checkers do not support the verification of linear temporal logic (LTL) because the existing algorithms of verifying LTL formulae are state-based, while stateless model checkers do not store any program states. This paper proposes a novel approach to stateless model checking of LTL formulae, based on the Actor formalism. Instead of translating an LTL formula into a Buechi automaton, which is the standard approach in model checking, the formula is translated into a set of actors that communicate with one another as well as with the main engine that explores the state space. As state space explosion is one of the main obstacles in practical applications of model checking, having such techniques that do not rely on recording of the visited states, can be a solution to this problem. We have modeled the proposed method using Rebeca, which is an actor-based modeling language with a formal foundation. The whole Rebeca model is translated into the Promela modeling language. Then, the models are verified using model checkers RMC and Spin. The proposed method modeled in Rebeca, the verification results, and an illustrative example are also presented in this paper.