Symbolic Reachability Analysis of Higher-Order Context-Free Processes

We consider the problem of symbolic reachability analysis of higher-order context-free processes. These models are generalizations of the context-free processes (also called BPA processes) where each process manipulates a data structure which can be seen as a nested stack of stacks. Our main result is that, for any higher-order context-free process, the set of all predecessors of a given regular set of configurations is regular and effectively constructible. This result generalizes the analogous result which is known for level 1 context-free processes. We show that this result holds also in the case of backward reachability analysis under a regular constraint on configurations. As a corollary, we obtain a symbolic model checking algorithm for the temporal logic E(U, X) with regular atomic predicates, i.e., the fragment of CTL restricted to the EU and EX modalities.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: FSTTCS
• Authors: Ahmed Bouajjani, Antoine Meyer
• Keywords: Context-free Processes, FSTTCS 2004, Reachability Analysis, Symbolic Reachability Analysis