A State Graph Manipulator Tool for Real-Time System Specification and Verification

The current technology of verification engineering requires well-trained personnels in logics and automaton theory, who carefully tune their verification packages, to tame the well-known state-space explosion problem. Several researches have resulted in a large number of techniques for reducing the system state-space, such as symmetry-based reductions, partial-order semantics, bisimulation equivalences, etc. To let more people benefit from the technology of computer-aided verification even with little training in the related theories, a new tool called State-Graph Manipulator (SGM) was developed to package various sophisticated verification techniques as manipulators on state-graphs as high-level data-objects. An example user session of SGM is discussed and the results presented. Experiments conducted using SGM show how the tool, when used by a system designer, can increase verification efficiency and scalability.