Symbolic Compilation of PSL

Abstract

Abstract-The IEEE standard Property Specification Language (PSL) is increasingly used in many phases of the hardware design cycle, from specification to verification. PSL combines Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) with Sequential Extended Regular Expressions (SEREs), and thus provides a natural formalism to express all ω-regular properties.In this paper, we propose a new method for efficiently converting PSL formulas into symbolically represented Nondeterministic (Generalized) Büchi Automata (NGBA), that are typically used in many verification and analysis tools. The construction is based on a normal form that separates the LTL and the SERE components, and allows for a modular and specialized encoding. The compilation is enhanced by a set of syntactic transformations that aim at reducing the state space of the resulting NGBA. These rules enable to achieve, at low cost, the simplification that can be achieved with expensive, semantic techniques based on minimization.A thorough experimental analysis over large sets of paradigmatic properties (from patterns of properties commonly used in practice) shows that our approach drastically reduces the compilation time, and positively affects the overall search time.

Efficient Model Checking of PSL Safety Properties

“…All tests were done on a Debian Linux machine with an Intel Core Duo 1.86 GHz processor and 2 GiB RAM. Both benchmark sets were against the state-of-theart PSL implementation that is presented in [19]. That implementation is also built on top of NuSMV.…”

“…That implementation is also built on top of NuSMV. For the first comparison, the same set of benchmarks is used as in the paper [19], which includes both general (non-safety) and safety properties. Their BDD-based algorithm, with syntactic optimizations turned on, is compared with the BDD-based invariant checking of NuSMV 2.4.3, combined with our transducer encoding based observer.…”

“…Given a word, tail implication r → φ 1 states that whenever a prefix of the word matches the SERE r, then the corresponding, one letter overlapping, postfix must satisfy φ 1 ; tail conjunction r → φ 1 holds if there exists some prefix of the word that matches r and the corresponding overlapping postfix satisfies φ 1 . The tail conjunction operator also appears in [19]. In addition to these operators, [3] also includes formulas of form r!…”

“…In our experiments we compare to the state-of-the-art symbolic encoding of all PSL properties [19]. The experiments show that the approach presented in this work is a very efficient model checking approach.…”

The COMPASS Approach: Correctness, Modelling and Performability of Aerospace Systems

“…To cope with the state explosion problem, advanced techniques can be applied, in particular symbolic techniques based on Binary Decision Diagrams (BDD) [9] and SAT-based Bounded Model Checking [4,5,22,18] (BMC). Verification can also benefit from advanced techniques for compiling temporal properties into a symbolic LTS [12].…”