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Partial-order reduction for general state exploring algorithms. (English) Zbl 1178.68336

Valmari, Antti (ed.), Model checking software. 13th international SPIN workshop, Vienna, Austria, March 30 – April 1, 2006. Proceedings. Berlin: Springer (ISBN 3-540-33102-6/pbk). Lecture Notes in Computer Science 3925, 271-287 (2006).
Summary: An important component of partial-order based reduction algorithms is the condition that prevents action ignoring, commonly known as the cycle proviso. In this paper we give a new version of this proviso that is applicable to a general search algorithm skeleton also known as the General State Expanding Algorithm (GSEA). GSEA maintains a set of open (visited but not expanded) states from which states are iteratively selected for exploration and moved to a closed set of states (visited and expanded). Depending on the open set data structure used, GSEA can be instantiated as depth-first, breadth-first, or a directed search algorithm. The proviso is characterized by reference to the open and closed set of states in GSEA. As a result the proviso can be computed in an efficient manner during the search based on local information. We implemented partial-order reduction for GSEA based on our proposed proviso in the tool HSF-SPIN, which is an extension of the model checker SPIN for directed model checking. We evaluate the state space reduction achieved by partial-order reduction according to the proviso that we propose by comparing it on a set of benchmark problems to other reduction approaches. We also compare the use of breadth-first search and A*, two algorithms ensuring that counterexamples of minimal length will be found, together with the proviso that we propose.
For the entire collection see [Zbl 1103.68011].

MSC:

68Q60 Specification and verification (program logics, model checking, etc.)
68T20 Problem solving in the context of artificial intelligence (heuristics, search strategies, etc.)

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