Complete Symbolic Simulation of SystemC Models: Efficient Formal Verification of Finite Non-Terminating Programs

In his master thesis, Vladimir Herdt presents a novel approach, called complete symbolic simulation, for a more efficient verification of much larger (non-terminating) SystemC programs. The approach combines symbolic simulation with stateful model checking and allows to verify safety properties in (cyclic) finite state spaces, by exhaustive exploration of all possible inputs and process schedulings. The state explosion problem is alleviated by integrating two complementary reduction techniques. Compared to existing approaches, the complete symbolic simulation works more efficiently, and therefore can provide correctness proofs for larger systems, which is one of the most challenging tasks, due to the ever increasing complexity.