Domain types: abstract-domain selection based on variable usage

Apel, Sven, Beyer, Dirk, Friedberger, Karlheinz, Raimondi, Franco ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9508-7713 and von Rhein, Alexander (2013) Domain types: abstract-domain selection based on variable usage. Hardware and Software: Verification and Testing, 8244 (1) . pp. 262-278. ISSN 0302-9743 [Article] (doi:10.1007/978-3-319-03077-7_18)

Abstract

The success of software model checking depends on finding an appropriate abstraction of the program to verify. The choice of the abstract domain and the analysis configuration is currently left to the user, who may not be familiar with the tradeoffs and performance details of the available abstract domains. We introduce the concept of domain types, which classify the program variables into types that are more fine-grained than standard declared types (e.g., ‘int’ and ‘long’) to guide the selection of an appropriate abstract domain for a model checker. Our implementation on top of an existing verification framework determines the domain type for each variable in a pre-analysis step, based on the usage of variables in the program, and then assigns each variable to an abstract domain. Based on a series of experiments on a comprehensive set of verification tasks from international verification competitions, we demonstrate that the choice of the abstract domain per variable (we consider one explicit and one symbolic domain) can substantially improve the verification in terms of performance and precision.

Actions (login required)

View Item

Statistics

DownloadsShow export options

Export as CSVXMLJSON

Activity Overview

6 month trend

0Downloads

6 month trend

408Hits

Additional statistics are available via IRStats2.