Symbolic and Structural Model-Checking

Brute-force model-checking consists in exhaustive exploration of the state-space of a Petri net, and meets the dreaded state-space explosion problem. In contrast, this paper shows how to solve model-checking problems using a combination of techniques that stay in complexity proportional to the size of the net structure rather than to the state-space size. We combine an SMT based over-approximation to prove that some behaviors are unfeasible, an under-approximation using memory-less sampling of runs to find witness traces or counter-examples, and a set of structural reduction rules that can simplify both the system and the property. This approach was able to win by a clear margin the model-checking contest 2020 for reachability queries as well as deadlock detection, thus demonstrating the practical effectiveness and general applicability of the system of rules presented in this paper.

Speeding Up Reachability Queries in Public Transport Networks Using Graph Partitioning

Computing path queries such as the shortest path in public transport networks is challenging because the path costs between nodes change over time. A reachability query from a node at a given start time on such a network retrieves all points of interest (POIs) that are reachable within a given cost budget. Reachability queries are essential building blocks in many applications, for example, group recommendations, ranking spatial queries, or geomarketing. We propose an efficient solution for reachability queries in public transport networks. Currently, there are two options to solve reachability queries. (1) Execute a modified version of Dijkstra’s algorithm that supports time-dependent edge traversal costs; this solution is slow since it must expand edge by edge and does not use an index. (2) Issue a separate path query for each single POI, i.e., a single reachability query requires answering many path queries. None of these solutions scales to large networks with many POIs. We propose a novel and lightweight reachability index. The key idea is to partition the network into cells. Then, in contrast to other approaches, we expand the network cell by cell. Empirical evaluations on synthetic and real-world networks confirm the efficiency and the effectiveness of our index-based reachability query solution.

Graph Indexing for Efficient Evaluation of Label-constrained Reachability Queries

Given a directed edge labeled graph G , to check whether vertex v is reachable from vertex u under a label set S is to know if there is a path from u to v whose edge labels across the path are a subset of S . Such a query is referred to as a label-constrained reachability ( LCR ) query. In this article, we present a new approach to store a compressed transitive closure of G in the form of intervals over spanning trees (forests). The basic idea is to associate each vertex v with two sequences of some other vertices: one is used to check reachability from v to any other vertex, by using intervals, while the other is used to check reachability to v from any other vertex. We will show that such sequences are in general much shorter than the number of vertices in G. Extensive experiments have been conducted, which demonstrates that our method is much better than all the previous methods for this problem in all the important aspects, including index construction times, index sizes, and query times.

CoVeriTest with Adaptive Time Scheduling (Competition Contribution)

CoVeriTest, which is integrated in the analysis framework CPAchecker, adopts verification technology for test-case generation. It encodes individual test goals as reachability queries, which are then processed by verifiers. To increase the effectiveness on a broad class of testing tasks, CoVeriTest leverages the strengths of two different analyses: an explicit value analysis and predicate abstraction. Similar to TestComp’20, the two analyses are interleaved and the time duration of an interleaving segment is calculated dynamically. However, the calculation of the time duration focuses on the predicted future performance instead of the past performance, thus, rewarding analyses that likely cover open test goals.