Local State Space Analysis Leads to Better Partial Order Reduction

This paper presents an approach to more efficient partial order reduction for explicit model checking of concurrent systems. This approach utilizes a compositional reachability analysis to generate overapproximate local state transition models for all components in a concurrent system where a dependence relation and other useful information can be extracted. The extracted dependence relation, compared to what can be obtained by statically analyzing the system descriptions, is more precise and refined, and therefore leads to more efficient partial order reduction. This approach is demonstrated on a set of concurrent system examples. Significantly higher reduction in state space has been observed in the majority of the examples compared to what can be obtained with SPIN.