Stepwise Flattening for Model Checking

Model checking complex systems always suffers from the state explosion problem. Over the last 10 years there has been lots of researches on how to mitigate the state explosion problem. As a result, many techniques have been emerged such as absiraction, compositional reasoning, and exploiting symmetry. In line with these efforts, this paper proposes stepwise model checking which exploits hierarchical structure in model checking to reduce a set of states to be considered at one time. Thus it makes model checking faster and mitigates the state explosion. This paper shows how to effectively handle an ECTL model checking or an ACTL model checking in such a way with an example.