ARMC: The Logical Choice for Software Model Checking with Abstraction Refinement

Abstract

Software model checking with abstraction refinement is emerging as a practical approach to verify industrial software systems. Its distinguishing characteristics lie in the way it applies logical reasoning to deal with abstraction. It is therefore natural to investigate whether and how the use of a constraint-based programming language may lead to an elegant and concise implementation of a practical tool. In this paper we describe the outcome of our investigation. Using a Prolog system together with Constraint Logic Programming extensions as the implementation platform of our choice we have built such a tool, called ARMC (for Abstraction Refinement Model Checking), which has already been used for practical verification.