On Locally Minimum and Strongest Assumption Generation Method for Component-Based Software Verification

Abstract

Since software becomes more complex during its life cycle, the verification cost becomes higher, especially for such methods which are using model checking in general and assume-guarantee reasoning in specific. To address the problem of reducing the assume-guarantee verification cost, this paper presents a method to generate locally minimum and strongest assumptions for verification of component-based software. For this purpose, we integrate a variant of membership queries answering technique to an algorithm which considers candidate assumptions that are smaller and stronger first, larger and weaker later. Because the algorithm stops as soon as it reaches a conclusive result, the generated assumptions are the locally minimum and strongest ones. The correctness proof of the proposed algorithm is also included in the paper. An implemented tool, test data, and experimental results are presented and discussed.