Local Analysis of Determinism for CSP

Abstract

Abstract. Nondeterminism is an inevitable constituent of any theory that describes concurrency. For the validation and verification of concurrent systems, it is essential to investigate the presence or absence of nondeterminism, just as much as deadlock or livelock. CSP is a well established process algebra; the main tool for practical use of CSP, the model checker FDR, checks determinism using a global analysis. We propose a local analysis, in order to improve performance and scalability. Our strategy is to use a compositional approach where we start from basic deterministic processes and check whether any of the composition operators introduce nondeterminism. We present the algorithms used in our strategy and experiments that show the efficiency of our approach.

Efficient verification of concurrent systems using local-analysis-based approximations and SAT solving

“…There exist approximate frameworks that are not based on approximating reachability but in ad-hoc necessary conditions of a given property. For instance, the frameworks in [OPRW13,FOSC16] check livelock freedom whereas the one in [OCS17] checks determinism. The use of conditions that are specific to a property makes these frameworks difficult to adapt for further properties.…”

“…Approximate techniques provide another alternative to deal with the state-space explosion problem [MJ97,AC05,CK94,DCCN04,OPRW13,OCS17,FOSC16,Ant18]. These techniques are built around the fact that a property P can often be approximated by some proxy property P satisfying two conditions.…”

Efficient Verification of Concurrent Systems Using Synchronisation Analysis and SAT/SMT Solving

“…In [5], we propose a framework that relies on (some of) the reachability approximations presented here to check static properties, namely, properties that can be naturally formulated as "a system cannot reach a state in which it can perform a given combination of events". Many other frameworks rely instead on necessary conditions that are inherent to the properties they check [42,63,64]. For instance, the cycle-of-dependencies condition checked by SDD is inherent to deadlock analysis, whereas frameworks in [42,63,64] use some specific necessary conditions to show livelock freedom and determinism.…”

“…Many other frameworks rely instead on necessary conditions that are inherent to the properties they check [42,63,64]. For instance, the cycle-of-dependencies condition checked by SDD is inherent to deadlock analysis, whereas frameworks in [42,63,64] use some specific necessary conditions to show livelock freedom and determinism. The use of these property-specific conditions makes these frameworks difficult to adapt to verifying other properties.…”

“…Approximate techniques are alternatives to these exact approaches [12,28,41,42,57,63,64]. These are built around the fact that a property P can often be approximated by some proxy property P ′ satisfying two conditions.…”