Automatic verification of parameterized systems

Verification plays an indispensable role in designing reliable computer hardware and software systems. With the fast growth in design complexity and the quick turnaround in design time, formal verification has become an increasingly important technology for establishing correctness as well as for finding difficult bugs. Since there is no ""silver-bullet"" to solve all verification problems, a spectrum of powerful techniques in formal verification have been developed to tackle different verification problems and complexity issues. Depending on the nature of the problem whose most salient components are the system implementation and the property specification, a proper methodology or a combination of different techniques is applied to solve the problem.; In this thesis, we focus on the research and development of formal methods to uniformly verify parameterized systems. A parameterized system is a class of systems obtained by instantiating the system parameters. Parameterized verification seeks a single correctness proof of a property for the entire class. Although the general parameterized verification problem is undecidable [AK86], it is possible to solve special classes by applying a repertoire of techniques and heuristics. Many methods in parameterized verification require a great deal of human interaction. This makes the application of these methods to real world problems infeasible. Thus, the main focus of this research is to develop techniques that can be automated to deliver proofs of safety and liveness properties.; Our research combines various formal techniques such as deductive methods, abstraction and model checking. One main result in this thesis is an automatic deductive method for parameterized verification. We apply small model properties of Bounded Data Systems (a special type of parameterized system) to help prove deductive inference rules for the safety properties of BDS systems. Another methodology we developed enables us to prove liveness properties of parameterized systems via an automatic abstraction method called counter abstraction . There are several useful by-products from our research: A set of heuristics is established for the automatic generation of program invariants which can benefit deductive verification in general; also we proposed methodologies for the automatic abstraction of fairness conditions that are crucial for proving liveness properties.