Improving Automata Generation for Linear Temporal Logic by Considering the Automaton Hierarchy

We present newalgorithms to translate linear time temporal logic (LTL) formulas with past operators to equivalent ω-automata. The resulting automata are given in a symbolic representation that directly supports symbolic model checking. Furthermore, this has the advantage that the translations run in linear time wrt. the length of the input formula. To increase the efficiency of the model checking, our translations avoid as far as possible the introduction of computationally expensive fairness constraints, or at least replace them by simpler reachability constraints. Using the well-known automaton hierarchy, we show that our improvements are complete. Finally, we show how large parts of the formulas can be translated to the simpler logic CTL, which accelerates the LTL model checking by orders of magnitude which is shown by experimental results.

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