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Randomized Backtracking in State Space Traversal

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Model Checking Software (SPIN 2011)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 6823))

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Abstract

While exhaustive state space traversal is not feasible in reasonable time for complex concurrent programs, many techniques for efficient detection of concurrency errors and testing of concurrent programs have been introduced in recent years, such as directed search and context-bounded model checking.

We propose to use depth-first traversal with randomized backtracking, where it is possible to backtrack from a state before all outgoing transitions have been explored, and the whole process is driven by random number choices. Experiments with a prototype implementation in JPF on several Java programs show that, in most cases, fewer states must be explored to find an error with our approach than using the existing techniques.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, Canada

    Pavel Parízek & Ondřej Lhoták

Authors
  1. Pavel Parízek
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  2. Ondřej Lhoták
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Oregon State University, 1148 Kelley Engineering Center, 97331-5501, Corvallis, OR, USA

    Alex Groce

  2. Microsoft Research, One Microsoft Way, 98052, Redmond, WA, USA

    Madanlal Musuvathi

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© 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Parízek, P., Lhoták, O. (2011). Randomized Backtracking in State Space Traversal. In: Groce, A., Musuvathi, M. (eds) Model Checking Software. SPIN 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6823. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-22306-8_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-22306-8_6

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-22305-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-22306-8

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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