A compositional proof of a real-time mutual exclusion protocol

Abstract

In this paper, we apply a compositional proof technique to an automatic verification of the correctness of Fischer’s mutual exclusion protocol. It is demonstrated that the technique may avoid the stateexplosion problem. Our compositional technique has recently been implemented in a tool CMC5, which verifies the protocol for 50 processes within 172.3 seconds and using only 32MB main memory. In contrast all existing verification tools for timed systems will suffer from the stateexplosion problem, and no tool has to our knowledge succeeded in verifying the protocol for more than 11 processes.