Fighting State Space Explosion: Review and Evaluation

In order to apply formal methods in practice, the practitioner has to comprehend a vast amount of research literature and realistically evaluate practical merits of different approaches. In this paper we focus on explicit finite state model checking and study this area from practitioner’s point of view. We provide a systematic overview of techniques for fighting state space explosion and we analyse trends in the research. We also report on our own experience with practical performance of techniques. Our main conclusion and recommendation for practitioner is the following: be critical to claims of dramatic improvement brought by a single sophisticated technique, rather use many different simple techniques and combine them.