Distributed CTL model checking using MapReduce : theory and practice

The recent extensive availability of 'cloud' computing platforms is very appealing for the formal verification community. In fact, these platforms represent a great opportunity to run massively parallel jobs and analyze 'big data' problems, although classical formal verification tools and techniques must undergo a deep technological transformation to take advantage of the available powerful architectures. A distributed approach to verification of computation tree logic formulas on very large state spaces is described. The approach exploits and integrates our parametric state-space builder, designed to ease the adoption of 'big data' platforms. The whole framework adopts a MAPREDUCEapproach as the core computational model and can be tailored to different modeling formalisms. This paper includes proofs of correctness, a short theoretical discussion about complexity, and reports a practical experience with some benchmarking Petri net models. The outcomes of several tests are presented, thus showing the convenience of the proposed approach.