A Compact File Format for Labeled Transition Systems

A compact open file format for labeled transition systems, which are commonly used in specification and verification of concurrent systems, is introduced. This combination of openness, both in specification and implementation, and compactness is unprecedented, since existing formats in this field are either not compact, yielding files too large to be easily handled, or proprietary, hampering the development of efficient tools. Therefore, the development of this svc format was initiated to facilitate the development of state-of-the-art tools for the analysis of concurrent systems and communication protocols. The svc format is specified by its binary layout and the underlying compression scheme, based on LempelZiv and dynamic Huffman encoding. Also, an application programming interface is defined. The compression scheme is compared with existing algorithms. 2000 Mathematics Subject Classification: 68N30 Specification and verification; 68P30 Coding and information theory 1998 ACM Computing Classification System: D.2.1 Requirements/Specifications; D.2.4 Program verification; E.4 Coding and information theory