A Comparison of Modular Verification Techniques

This paper presents and compares three techniques for mechanized ver-iication of state-oriented design descriptions. The goal of this work is to gain insight into quantitative aspects of diierent modular veriication techniques. One of the three veriication techniques presented here is a traditional forward generation of a xed point characterizing the reachable states. This does not utilize any modu-larity provided by the designer, and therefore it forms the basis for the comparison, whereas the two others do utilize such a modularity. One requires a substantial manual eeort by the designer, but is computationally very eecient, while the other requires almost no manual assistance with a much better performance than the simple forward generation. The performance of the three techniques is compared on a set of examples.