Information reuse for multi-goal reachability analyses

Abstract

It is known that model checkers can generate test inputs as witnesses for reachability specifications (or, equivalently, as counterexamples for safety properties). While this use of model checkers for testing yields a theoretically sound test-generation procedure, it scales poorly for computing complex test suites for large sets of test goals, because each test goal requires an expensive run of the model checker. We represent test goals as automata and exploit relations between automata in order to reuse existing reachability information for the analysis of subsequent test goals. Exploiting the sharing of sub-automata in a series of reachability queries, we achieve considerable performance improvements over the standard approach. We show the practical use of our multi-goal reachability analysis in a predicate-abstraction-based test-input generator for the test-specification language FQL. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.