Refining Approximations in Software Predicate Abstraction

Predicate abstraction is an automatic technique that can be used to find abstract models of large or infinite-state systems. In tools like Slam, where predicate abstraction is applied to software model checking, a number of heuristic approximations must be used to improve the performance of computing an abstraction from a set of predicates. For this reason, Slam can sometimes reach a state in which it is not able to further refine the abstraction.

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