Context-bounded analysis for concurrent programs with dynamic creation of threads. (English) Zbl 1237.68056

Atig, Mohamed Faouzi; Bouajjani, Ahmed; Qadeer, Shaz

Log. Methods Comput. Sci. 7, No. 4, Paper No. 4, 48 p. (2011).

Summary: Context-bounded analysis has been shown to be both efficient and effective at finding bugs in concurrent programs. According to its original definition, context-bounded analysis explores all behaviors of a concurrent program up to some fixed number of context switches between threads. This definition is inadequate for programs that create threads dynamically because bounding the number of context switches in a computation also bounds the number of threads involved in the computation. In this paper, we propose a more general definition of context-bounded analysis useful for programs with dynamic thread creation. The idea is to bound the number of context switches for each thread instead of bounding the number of switches of all threads. We consider several variants based on this new definition, and we establish decidability and complexity results for the analysis induced by them.

MSC:

68N30	Mathematical aspects of software engineering (specification, verification, metrics, requirements, etc.)
68Q60	Specification and verification (program logics, model checking, etc.)
68Q85	Models and methods for concurrent and distributed computing (process algebras, bisimulation, transition nets, etc.)

Keywords:

pushdown systems; program verification; reachability analysis

Software:

SPIN