A major problem in model-checking timed systems is the<br />huge memory requirement. In this paper, we study the memory-block<br />traversal problems of using standard operating systems in exploring the<br />state-space of timed automata. We report a case study which demonstrates<br />that deallocating memory blocks (i.e. memory-block traversal)<br />using standard memory management routines is extremely time-consuming.<br />The phenomenon is demonstrated in a number of experiments by<br />installing the Uppaal tool on Windows95, SunOS 5 and Linux. It seems<br />that the problem should be solved by implementing a memory manager<br />for the model-checker, which is a troublesome task as it is involved in<br />the underlining hardware and operating system. We present an alternative<br />technique that allows the model-checker to control the memory-block<br />traversal strategies of the operating systems without implementing<br />an independent memory manager. The technique is implemented in the<br />Uppaal model-checker. Our experiments demonstrate that it results in<br />significant improvement on the performance of Uppaal. For example, it<br />reduces the memory deallocation time in checking a start-up synchronisation<br />protocol on Linux from 7 days to about 1 hour. We show that the<br />technique can also be applied in speeding up re-traversals of explored<br />state-space.
Fully Symbolic Model Checking of Timed Systems using Difference Decision Diagrams1 1This work was carried out while the authors were at the Department of Information Technology, Technical University of Denmark, and was finnancially supported by a grant from the Danish Technical Research Council.
