Temporal Verification of Fault-Tolerant Protocols

The automated verification of concurrent and distributed systems is a vibrant and successful area within Computer Science. Over the last 30 years, temporal logic [10,20] has been shown to provide a clear, concise and intuitive description of many such systems, and automata-theoretic techniques such as model checking [7,14] have been shown to be very useful in practical verification. Recently, the verification of infinite-state systems, particularly parameterised systems comprising arbitrary numbers of identical processes, has become increasingly important [5]. Practical problems of an open, distributed nature often fit into this model, for example robot swarms of arbitrary sizes.