Using asynchronous Büchi automata for efficient automatic verification of concurrent systems

An Asynchronous Büchi Automaton is a collection of concurrently executing automata, able to perform operations that are shared between one or more of their concurrent components. These automata can be used to specify properties of distributed protocols. In this paper, an efficient method for verifying that a protocol satisfies its Asynchronous Büchi Automaton specification is presented. In order to alleviate a potential state space explosion while verifying a protocol, a state reduction technique is used. The construction results in a reduced state space that contains at least one representative sequence for each equivalence class of infinite sequences. This guarantees that the full state space contains an accepting execution if and only if the reduced state space contains one. This method can also be used to check for the emptyness of an Asynchronous Büchi Automaton. Thus, it can be used to check the validity of specification languages that can be translated into such automata, such as Thiagarajan’s TrPTL.