A Fault Localization Approach Derived From Testing-based Formal Verification

The rapid development of safety-critical systems eagerly demands for the formal verification or enormous testing to ensure the correctness of programs. Testing-based formal verification with symbolic execution (TBFV-SE), a technique that integrates both formal verification and testing, taking the advantages of both methods without so much cost to meet such need. In order to further pinpoint the problematic positions in the code when TBFV-SE gives the incorrect program paths, we describe a fault localization algorithm to do this work through making use of the information provided by TBFV-SE. A case study demonstrates that our algorithm can more effectively and efficiently shrink the scale of suspicious lines of the code.