Ubiquitous abstraction: a new approach for mechanized formal verification

Ubiquitous abstraction involves the construction of many different abstracted system descriptions at many different points in an analysis, and for several different purposes. This method has great promise as a way to ease difficulties and increase productivity and automation in the formal analysis of concurrent systems. The approach also provides a new way to combine different tools, such as theorem provers and model checkers, though full exploitation of this opportunity requires modification to the tools so that they can exchange symbolic values (e.g. the reachable state set, or a counterexample) rather than merely report the success or failure of their own local analysis. Some of the capabilities described are already integrated in a system called InVeSt (S. Bensalem et al., 1998) and initial experiments with this and other prototypes developed as part of our "Symbolic Analysis Laboratory" (SAL) are quite promising.