Memory Efficient State Space Storage in Explicit Software Model Checking

Abstract

The limited amount of memory is the major bottleneck in model checking tools based on an explicit states enumeration. In this context, techniques allowing an efficient representation of the states are precious. We present in this paper a novel approach which enables to store the state space in a compact way. Though it belongs to the family of explicit storage methods, we qualify it as semi-explicit since all states are not explicitly represented in the state space. Our experiments report a memory reduction ratio up to 95% with only a tripling of the computing time in the worst case.

Memory‐efficient State‐space Analysis in Software Model Checking

“…The table also gives the additional delay incurred when using a solution. The proposed algorithm provides reduction equivalent to (Evangelista & Pradat-Peyre 2005) with only 2/3 of its delay. In Partial storage, only a subset of the explored states are stored.…”

“…Our decompression algorithm only doubles the time needed to generate the state-space. This is 33% lower than the time taken by (Evangelista & Pradat-Peyre 2005). The remainder of the paper is organised as follows.…”

The ComBack Method Revisited: Caching Strategies and Extension with Delayed Duplicate Detection

“…In [5] a reduction technique also based on state reconstruction is proposed. The algorithm is parametrized by an integer k and only caches states at levels 0, k, 2 · k, 3 · k .…”

“…The motivation of this strategy is to bound the length of reconstructing sequences to k − 1. As presented, the strategy in [5] does not bound the size of the cache but k could be dynamically increased to solve this problem.…”

Correcting a Space-Efficient Simulation Algorithm

“…In many crucial applications, space rather than time becomes the bottleneck as the input graph grows [4,7,8,12]. Hence, simulation algorithms with minimal space complexity are of particular interest.…”