Analysis of Agent-Based Systems Using Decision Procedures

Abstract

In recent years, model checking has emerged as a remarkably effective technique for the automated analysis of descriptions of hardware systems and communication protocols. To analyze software system descriptions, however, a direct application of model checking rarely succeeds, since these descriptions often have huge (often infinite) state spaces that are not amenable to the finite-state methods of model checking. More important, the computation of a fixpoint (the hallmark of the model-checking approach) is not always needed in practice for the verification of an interesting class of properties, viz, properties that are invariantly true in all reachable states or transitions of the system. To establish a property as an invariant, an induction proof, suitably augmented with automatically generated lemmas, often suffices.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jul 01, 2001
Accession Number
ADA465305

Entities

People

  • Ramesh Bharadwaj

Organizations

  • United States Naval Research Laboratory

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Engineered Resilient Systems
  • Human Systems

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Abstracts
  • Algorithms
  • Arithmetic
  • Automation
  • Computations
  • Information Operations
  • Language
  • Military Research
  • Research Facilities
  • Specifications
  • Standards
  • Transitions

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Mathematical Modeling and Probability Theory.
  • Systems Analysis and Design

Technology Areas

  • Space