Summary: On­the­fly Reachability and Cycle Detection for
Recursive State Machines #
Rajeev Alur 1 , Swarat Chaudhuri 1 , Kousha Etessami 2 , and P. Madhusudan 3
1 University of Pennsylvania, USA
2 University of Edinburgh, UK
3 University of Illinois at Urbana­Champaign, USA
Abstract. Searching the state space of a system using enumerative
and on­the­fly depth­first traversal is an established technique for model
checking finite­state systems. In this paper, we propose algorithms for
on­the­fly exploration of recursive state machines, or equivalently push­
down systems, which are suited for modeling the behavior of procedural
programs. We present algorithms for reachability (is a bad state reach­
able?) as well as for fair cycle detection (is there a reachable cycle with
progress?). We also report on an implementation of these algorithms to
check safety and liveness properties of recursive boolean programs, and
its performance on existing benchmarks.
1 Introduction
Recursive state machines (RSM) can model control flow in typical sequential im­
perative programming languages with recursive procedure calls, and are equiva­
lent to pushdown systems [1]. Even though the state­space of an RSM is infinite

Source: Alur, Rajeev - Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Pennsylvania
Parthasarathy, Madhusudan - Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Collections: Computer Technologies and Information Sciences