Memory Efficient State Space Storage in Explicit Software Model Checking

The limited amount of memory is the major bottleneck in model checking tools based on an explicit states enumeration. In this context, techniques allowing an efficient representation of the states are precious. We present in this paper a novel approach which enables to store the state space in a compact way. Though it belongs to the family of explicit storage methods, we qualify it as semi-explicit since all states are not explicitly represented in the state space. Our experiments report a memory reduction ratio up to 95% with only a tripling of the computing time in the worst case.

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