Model-Checking: A Tutorial Introduction

In the past two decades, model-checking has emerged as a promising and powerful approach to fully automatic verification of hardware systems. But model checking technology can be usefully applied to other application areas, and this article provides fundamentals that a practitioner can use to translate verification problems into model-checking questions. A taxonomy of the notions of "model," "property," and "model checking" are presented, and three standard model-checking approaches are described and applied to examples.