Abstraction Methods for Liveness

It is a known fact that finitary state abstraction methods, such as predicate abstraction, are inadequate for verifying general liveness properties or even termination of sequential programs. In this talk we will present an abstraction approach called "ranking abstraction" which is sound and complete for verifying all temporally specified properties, including all liveness properties. We will start by presenting a general simple framework for state abstraction emphasizing that, in order to get soundness, it is necessary to apply an over-approximating abstraction to the system and an under-approximating abstraction to the (temporal) property...