Debugging of Concurrent Systems using Counterexample Analysis

Abstract : Model checking is an established technique for automatically verifying that a model satisfies a given temporal property. When the model violates the property, the model checker returns a counterexample , which is a sequence of actions leading to a state where the property is not satisfied. Understanding this counterexample for debugging the specification is a complicated task for several reasons: (i) the counterexample can contain hundreds of actions, (ii) the debugging task is mostly achieved manually, and (iii) the counterexample does not give any clue on the state of the system (e.g., parallelism or data expressions) when the error occurs. This paper presents a new approach that improves the usability of model checking by simplifying the comprehension of counterexamples. Our solution aims at keeping only actions in counterexamples that are relevant for debugging purposes. To do so, we first extract in the model all the counterexamples. Second, we define an analysis algorithm that identifies actions that make the behaviour skip from incorrect to correct behaviours, making these actions relevant from a debugging perspective. Our approach is fully automated by a tool that we implemented and applied on real-world case studies from various application areas for evaluation purposes.