Revisiting underapproximate reachability for multipushdown systems

Abstract

Boolean programs with multiple recursive threads can be captured as pushdown automata with multiple stacks. This model is Turing complete, and hence, one is often interested in analyzing a restricted class which still captures useful behaviors. In this paper, we propose a new class of bounded underapproximations for multi-pushdown systems, which subsumes most existing classes. We develop an efficient algorithm for solving the under-approximate reachability problem, which is based on efficient fix-point computations. We implement it in our tool BHIM and illustrate its applicability by generating a set of relevant benchmarks and examining its performance. As an additional takeaway BHIM solves the binary reachability problem in pushdown automata. To show the versatility of our approach, we then extend our algorithm to the timed setting and provide the first implementation that can handle timed multi-pushdown automata with closed guards.