Algorithmic verification of population protocols

Abstract

In this work, we study the Population Protocol model of Angluin et al. from the perspective of protocol verification. In particular, we are interested in algorithmically solving the problem of determining whether a given population protocol conforms to its specifications. Since this is the first work on verification of population protocols, we redefine most notions of population protocols in order to make them suitable for algorithmic verification. Moreover, we formally define the general verification problem and some interesting special cases. All these problems are shown to be NP-hard. We next propose some first algorithmic solutions for a natural special case. Finally, we conduct experiments and algorithmic engineering in order to improve our verifiers' running times. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.