A Survey on Coping with the State Space Explosion Problem in Model Checking

ABSTRACT: Today, computer systems play a significant role in our daily lives. They are used in many different fields such as: smart cards, mobile phones, smart devices, telecommunication systems, e-commerce, banking system and etc. However, the more computer systems penetrate our lives, the more complicated they get. On the other hand, some of them are used in critical applications in which a bug or an error can be fatal, catastrophic and causes a huge loss of money, like: nuclear plants, chemical plants, aviation systems, biological devices and etc. Therefore, this kind of computer systems needs more accurate and precise type of verification than the traditional test and simulation techniques. Hence, formal software verification approaches use instead. Model checking is an effective and efficient type of formal verification which has been used for verification of safety-critical systems in last two decades. In model checking technique, the system which has to be verified, is modeled as a finite state machine in which nodes are system states and edges are transitions between those states. The major drawback of model checking approach is state space explosion which means the number of states needed to model the system exceeded the amount of available memory. There are several methods to fight the state space explosion. This survey provides a perspective on these techniques and reviews some of the previous articles.