A Bounded Semantics for Improving the Efficiency of Bounded Model Checking

One of the main concerns of automated verification and error detection of software designs is the efficiency. Although bounded model checking (BMC) has been proven to be effective for error detection, further improvement of the efficiency is of great importance to the practical application of such methods. The development of BMC approaches is based on bounded semantics of temporal logics. Therefore the design of bounded semantics is essential for the subsequent BMC approaches. In this work, we propose a non-monotone bounded semantics for the linear temporal logic (LTL), and consequently a non-monotone BMC approach for improving the efficiency of bounded model checking. To this end, the information that a formula is unsatisfiable in an early step of checking is partly taken into consideration in a later one (in the sequence) in order to provide possibility for dismissing some of the irrelevant paths quickly in checking the later more complicated bounded model. The experimental results have shown that this approach has clear advantage over the traditional one on the test cases with respect to the efficiency. A comparison of such a non-monotone BMC approach with the traditional one implemented in the well-known model checking tools NuSMV and nuXmv is also reported.