34236220
To Store or Not to Store
To limit the explosion problem encountered during reachability analysis we suggest a variety of techniques for reducing the number of states to be stored during exploration, while maintaining the guarantee of termination and keeping the number of revisits small. The techniques include static analysis methods for component automata in order to determine small sets of covering transitions. We carry out extensive experimental investigation of the techniques within the real-time verification tool Uppaal. Our experimental results are extremely encouraging: a best combination is identified which for a variety of industrial case-studies reduces the space-consumption to less than 10% with only a moderate overhead in time-performance.
4574615
As Cheap as Possible: Efficient Cost-Optimal Reachability for Priced Timed Automata
In this paper we present an algorithm for efficiently computing optimal cost of reaching a goal state in the model of Linearly Priced Timed Automata (LPTA). The central contribution of this paper is a priced extension of so-called zones. This, together with a notion of facets of a zone, allows the entire machinery for symbolic reachability for timed automata in terms of zones to be lifted to cost-optimal reachability using priced zones. We report on experiments with a cost-optimizing extension of Uppaal on a number of examples.
14315022
Scaling up Uppaal Automatic Verification of Real-Time Systems Using Compositionality and Abstraction
To combat the state-explosion problem in automatic verification, we present a method for scaling up the real-time verification tool UPPAAL by complementing it with methods for abstraction and compositionality. We identify a notion of timed ready simulation which we show is a sound condition for preservation of safety properties between real-time systems, and in addition is a precongruence with respect to parallel composition. Thus, it supports both abstraction and compositionality. We furthermore present a method for automatically testing for the existence of a timed ready simulation between real-time systems using the UPPAAL tool.
12983032
Practical verification of embedded software
Using a new verification algorithm called the compositional backward technique, the authors demonstrate that they can exhaustively verify even the largest industrial applications-comprising more than 1,000 components-in a few minutes on a standard PC.
1457644
Time-Optimal Test Cases for Real-Time Systems
Testing is the primary software validation technique used by industry today, but remains ad hoc, error prone, and very expensive. A promising improvement is to automatically generate test cases from formal models of the system under test.
8987497
Efficient Timed Reachability Analysis Using Clock Difference Diagrams
One of the major problems in applying automatic verification tools to industrial-size systems is the excessive amount of memory required during the state-space exploration of a model. In the setting of real-time, this problem of state-explosion requires extra attention as information must be kept not only on the discrete control structure but also on the values of continuous clock variables. 
 
In this paper, we exploit Clock Difference Diagrams, CDD's, a BDD-like data-structure for representing and effectively manipulating certain nonconvex subsets of the Euclidean space, notably those encountered during verification of timed automata. 
 
A version of the real-time verification tool Uppaal using CDD's as a compact data-structure for storing explored symbolic states has been implemented. Our experimental results demonstrate significant spacesavings: for eight industrial examples, the savings are in average 42% with moderate increase in runtime. 
 
We further report on how the symbolic state-space exploration itself may be carried out using CDD's.
406624
Model Checking Timed Automata with Priorities Using DBM Subtraction
In this paper we describe an extension of timed automata with priorities, and efficient algorithms to compute subtraction on DBMs (difference bounded matrices), needed in symbolic model-checking of timed automata with priorities. The subtraction is one of the few operations on DBMs that result in a non-convex set needing sets of DBMs for representation. Our subtraction algorithms are efficient in the sense that the number of generated DBMs is significantly reduced compared to a naive algorithm. The overhead in time is compensated by the gain from reducing the number of resulting DBMs since this number affects the performance of symbolic model-checking. The uses of the DBM subtraction operation extend beyond timed automata with priorities. It is also useful for allowing guards on transitions with urgent actions, deadlock checking, and timed games.
2737251
Better Bounds on the Accommodating Ratio for the Seat Reservation Problem
We investigate the problem of giving seat reservations on-line. We assume that a train travels from a start station to an end station, stopping at k stations, including the first and last. Passengers may attempt to make reservations at any point before they get on the train, and reservations can be made going from any station to any later station. All algorithms under consideration must be "fair", i.e., they are not allowed to reject a request for a reservation which could be made at the time. The "accommodating ratio" compares the performance of an on-line algorithm to that of the optimal off-line algorithm, under the assumption that the only sequences of requests allowed are sequences for which the optimal off-line algorithm could accommodate all requests. The train has a fixed number of seats, and we first consider the case in which all tickets have the same cost, and the seat reservation system attempts to maximize income. We prove improved upper bounds on the performance of First-Fit and Best-Fit, showing that in the worst case, neither algorithm does significantly better than any fair deterministic algorithm would. We also improve the upper bounds on the possible performance of any "fair" deterministic or randomized algorithm. A specific randomized algorithm is also considered. Finally, we consider the case in which the cost of a ticket is proportional to the distance traveled.
207106047
Efficient Rebalancing of B-Trees with Relaxed Balance
B-trees with relaxed balance have been defined to facilitate fast updating on shared-memory asynchronous parallel architectures. To obtain this, rebalancing has been uncoupled from the updating so that extensive locking can be avoided in connection with updates. We analyze B-trees with relaxed balance, and prove that each update gives rise to at most [loga(N/2)]+1 rebalancing operations, where a is the degree of the B-tree, and N is the bound on its maximal size since it was last in balance. Assuming that the size of nodes is at least twice the degree, we prove that rebalancing can be performed in amortized constant time. So, in the long run, rebalancing is constant time on average, even if any particular update could give rise to a logarithmic number of rebalancing operations. We also prove that the amount of rebalancing done at any particular level decreases exponentially going from the leaves towards the root. This is important since the higher up in the tree a lock due to a rebalancing operation occurs, the larger a subtree which cannot be accessed by other processes for the duration of that lock. All of these results are in fact obtained for the more general (a, b)-trees, so we have results for both of the common B-tree versions as well as 2-3 trees and 2-3-4 trees.
29458471
AVL Trees with Relaxed Balance
The idea of relaxed balance is to uncouple the rebalancing in search trees from the updating in order to speed up request processing in main-memory databases. In this paper, we describe a relaxed version of AVL trees. We prove that each update gives rise to at most a logarithmic number of rebalancing operations and that the number of rebalancing operations in the semidynamic case is amortized constant.
32290696
Efficient Rebalancing of Chromatic Search Trees
In PODS'91, Nurmi and Soisalon-Soininen presented a new type of binary search tree for databases, which they call a chromatic tree. The aim is to improve runtime performance by allowing a greater degree of concurrency, which, in turn, is obtained by uncoupling updating from rebalancing. This also allows rebalancing to be postponed completely or partially until after peak working hours.