Model Checking with Automatic Guidance

Model checking involves exploring state-space of system model and automatically proving or disproving the correct functionality of the system. Verification of all properties may not require exploration of the state-space in its entirety. However, traditional model checkers are not equipped with enough knowledge of the system apriori to make smart decisions so as to explore only those portions of state-space that contribute to the result. In this paper, we present a technique to provide such guidance to the model checker so that it can perform state-space exploration more intelligently. We incorporated our technique in XMC model checker, a tool for verifying process expressions in CCS against properties expressed by modal mu-calculus formulas. We demonstrate the applicability of our guidance mechanism by verifying several example protocols from XMC test-suite.