Chesmin: a heuristic for state reduction in incompletely specified finite state machines

A heuristic algorithm, chesmin (checking sequence based state minimization), is proposed for state reduction in incompletely specified finite state machines (ISFSMs). The algorithm is based on checking sequence generation and identification of sets of compatible states. We have obtained results as good as the best exact method in the literature but with significantly better run-times. In addition to finding a reduced FSM, our algorithm also generates an I/O sequence that can be used as test vectors to verify the FSM's implementation.