Family-based Model Checking using Probabilistic Model Checker PRISM

Family-based model checking of product families is a technique to verify multiple products simultaneously by model checking the variational model. This technique is useful for design verification of core assets, etc. but it has the problem that scalability issues are more pronounced compared to model checking of a single system. Although it would be more convenient to use existing model checkers, most studies use dedicated model checkers because of the efficiency. In this paper, we propose a method of family-based model checking using an existing probabilistic model checker, PRISM, for FTS (Featured Transition Systems). It is possible to verify whether there exist feature configurations for which the property holds, and also obtain a specific feature configuration example for which the property holds. In order to improve scalability, we divide the corresponding FD (Feature Diagram) into smaller FDs by adding constraints on the selection or deselection of features and perform model checking based on these divided FDs independently. Although this method does not always guarantee improvement in theory, our evaluation shows that it can be quite effective in many cases by selecting features to be used for division using metrics based on the probability of occurrence of the features.