Inherent vacuity in lattice automata

Hila Gonen, Orna Kupferman

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

1 Scopus citations

Abstract

Vacuity checking is traditionally performed after model checking has terminated successfully. It ensures that all the elements of the specification have played a role in its satisfaction by the system. The need to check the quality of specifications is even more acute in property-based design, where the specification is the only input, serving as a basis to the development of the system. Inherent vacuity adapts the theory of vacuity in model checking to the setting of property-based design. Essentially, a specification is inherently vacuous if it can be mutated into a simpler equivalent specification, which is known, in the case of specifications in linear temporal logic, to coincide with the fact the specification is satisfied vacuously in all systems. A recent development in formal methods is an extension of the Boolean setting to a multi-valued one. In particular, instead of Boolean automata, which either accept or reject their input, there is a growing interest in weighted automata, which map an input word to a value from a semiring over a large domain. A distributive finite lattice is a special case of a semiring, and lattice automata are used in several methods for reasoning about multi-valued objects. We study inherent vacuity in the setting of lattice automata, namely the ability to mutate the value of a transition in the automaton without changing its language. We define the concept of inherent vacuity in lattice automata, study the complexity of deciding different types of vacuity, and relate the setting to the one known for linear temporal logics.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationFields of Logic and Computation II - Essays Dedicated to Yuri Gurevich on the Occasion of His 75th Birthday
EditorsAndreas Blass, Bernd Finkbeiner, Nachum Dershowitz, Wolfram Schulte, Lev D. Beklemishev
PublisherSpringer Verlag
Pages174-192
Number of pages19
ISBN (Print)9783319235332
DOIs
StatePublished - 2015
Externally publishedYes
EventSymposium on Yurifest, 2015 - Berlin, Germany
Duration: 11 Sep 201512 Sep 2015

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume9300
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

ConferenceSymposium on Yurifest, 2015
Country/TerritoryGermany
CityBerlin
Period11/09/1512/09/15

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015.

Funding

The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013) / ERC grant agreement no 278410, and from The Israel Science Foundation (grant no 1229/10).

FundersFunder number
European Commission
Israel Science Foundation
Seventh Framework Programme
European Commission278410
Israel Science Foundation1229/10

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