Model checking

In computer science, model checking or property checking refers to the following problem: Given a model of a system, exhaustively and automatically check whether this model meets a given specification. Typically, one has hardware or software systems in mind, whereas the specification contains safety requirements such as the absence of deadlocks and similar critical states that can cause the system to crash. Model checking is a technique for automatically verifying correctness properties of finite-state systems.

In order to solve such a problem algorithmically, both the model of the system and the specification are formulated in some precise mathematical language. To this end, the problem is formulated as a task in logic, namely to check whether a given structure satisfies a given logical formula. This general concept applies to many kinds of logics and suitable structures. A simple model checking problem is verifying whether a given formula in the propositional logic is satisfied by a given structure.

Property checking is used for verification instead of equivalence checking when two descriptions are not functionally equivalent. Particularly, during refinement, the specification is complemented with the details that are unnecessary in the higher level specification. Yet, there is no need to verify the newly introduced properties against the original specification. It is not even possible. Therefore, the strict bi-directional equivalence check is relaxed to one-way property checking. The implementation or design is regarded a model of the circuit whereas the specifications are properties that the model must satisfy.

An important class of model checking methods have been developed for checking models of hardware and software designs where the specification is given by a temporal logic formula. Pioneering work in temporal logic specification was done by Amir Pnueli, who received the 1996 Turing award for "[...] seminal work introducing temporal logic into computing science",. Model checking began with the pioneering work by E. M. Clarke and E. A. Emerson and by J. P. Queille and J. Sifakis. Clarke, Emerson, and Sifakis shared the 2007 Turing Award for their seminal work founding and developing the field of model checking.

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