Abstract
Abstract state machines (ASMs) provide the basis of a successful methodology for specification and verification of software and hardware systems. Nevertheless, computer aided verification of ASM-programs has not yet been well-developed. In this paper we try to shed some light on the limits of automatic verifiability of ASM-programs.
We introduce a class of restricted ASM-programs, which are called nullary programs, and provide an algorithm that decides whether a given nullary program satisfies a given correctness property (expressible in a CTL*-like temporal logic) on all inputs. Our decision algorithm runs in Pspace and we show that this is optimal. We also show that straight- forward generalizations of nullary programs cannot be verified algorithmically, as some basic verification problems become undecidable.
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Spielmann, M. (1999). Automatic Verification of Abstract State Machines. In: Halbwachs, N., Peled, D. (eds) Computer Aided Verification. CAV 1999. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1633. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-48683-6_37
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-48683-6_37
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