Abstract
The boundaries of model-checking have been extended through the use of abstraction. These techniques are conservative, in the following sense: when the verification succeeds, the verified property is guaranteed to hold; but when it fails, it may result either from the non satisfaction of the property, or from a too rough abstraction. In case of failure, it is, in general, undecidable whether an abstract trace corresponding to a counter-example has any concrete counterparts. For debugging purposes, one usually desires to go further than giving a “yes/no” answer (actually, a “yes/don’t know” answer!), and look for such concrete counter-examples. We propose a solution in which we apply standard test-pattern generation technology to search for concrete instances of abstract traces.
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Pace, G., Halbwachs, N. & Raymond, P. Counter-example generation in symbolic abstract model-checking. STTT 5, 158–164 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10009-003-0127-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10009-003-0127-4