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Constraint-based deadlock checking of high-level specifications

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 July 2011

STEFAN HALLERSTEDE  and
MICHAEL LEUSCHEL
STEFAN HALLERSTEDE
Affiliation:
Institut für Informatik, Universität Düsseldorf, Universitätsstr. 1, D-40225 Düsseldorf, Germany (e-mail: halstefa@cs.uni-duesseldorf.de, leuschel@cs.uni-duesseldorf.de)
MICHAEL LEUSCHEL
Affiliation:
Institut für Informatik, Universität Düsseldorf, Universitätsstr. 1, D-40225 Düsseldorf, Germany (e-mail: halstefa@cs.uni-duesseldorf.de, leuschel@cs.uni-duesseldorf.de)
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Abstract

Establishing the absence of deadlocks is important in many applications of formal methods. The use of model checking for finding deadlocks in formal models is often limited. In this paper, we propose a constraint-based approach to finding deadlocks employing the ProB constraint solver. We present the general technique, as well as various improvements that had to be performed on ProB's Prolog kernel, such as reification of membership and arithmetic constraints. This work was guided by an industrial case study, where a team from Bosch was modelling a cruise control system. Within this case study, ProB was able to quickly find counterexamples to very large deadlock-freedom constraints. In the paper, we also present other successful applications of this new technique. Experiments using SAT and SMT solvers on these constraints were thus far unsuccessful.

Keywords

constraintsformal methodsdeadlocksPrologapplications
Type
Regular Papers
Information
Theory and Practice of Logic Programming , Volume 11 , Special Issue 4-5: 27th International Conference on Logic Programming , July 2011 , pp. 767 - 782
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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