Reachability analysis of multithreaded software with asynchronous communication

Abstract

We introduce asynchronous dynamic pushdown networks (ADPN), a new model for multithreaded programs in which pushdown systems communicate via shared memory. ADPN generalizes both CPS (concurrent pushdown systems) [7] and DPN (dynamic pushdown networks) [5]. We show that ADPN exhibit several advantages as a program model. Since the reachability problem for ADPN is undecidable even in the case without dynamic creation of processes, we address the bounded reachability problem [7], which considers only those computation sequences where the (index of the) thread accessing the shared memory is changed at most a fixed given number of times. We provide efficient algorithms for both forward and backward reachability analysis. The algorithms are based on automata techniques for symbolic representation of sets of configurations. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.