Distributed CTL model checking

As model checking becomes increasingly used in industry, there is a big need for efficient new methods to deal with the large real-size designs. The author presents a novel method for improving the performance of model checking using parallelisation techniques. The model checking is performed on a distributed-memory environment consisting of a network of machines. The important two keys to focus on are the memory balance and communication reduction. A new algorithm for partitioning the large state space modelling industrial designs with hundreds of millions of states and transitions is proposed. The state space is supposed to be represented by a weighted Kripke structure (this is an extension of the Kripke structure where weights are associated with the states and with the transitions). This algorithm partitions the weighted Kripke structure by performing a combination of abstraction-partition-refinement on this structure. The CTL model checking algorithm is distributed on processes located on different network machines. Each one owns a partition and executes the algorithm on it. The algorithm for CTL model checking is designed to reduce the communication overhead between the processes. The experimental results on large real designs show that this method improves the quality of partitions, the communication overhead and then the overall performance of the model checking.