On Scheduling Constraint Abstraction for Multi-Threaded Program Verification

Bounded model checking is among the most efficient techniques for the automated verification of concurrent programs. However, due to the nondeterministic thread interleavings, a large and complex formula is usually required to give an exact encoding of all possible behaviors, which significantly limits the scalability. Observing that the large formula is usually dominated by the exact encoding of the scheduling constraint, this paper proposes a novel scheduling constraint based abstraction refinement method for multi-threaded C program verification. Our method is both efficient in practice and complete in theory, which is challenging for existing techniques. To achieve this, we first proposed an effective and powerful technique which works well for nearly all benchmarks we evaluated. We have proposed the notion of Event Order Graph (EOG), and have devised two graph-based algorithms over EOG for counterexample validation and refinement generation, which can often obtain a small yet effective refinement constraint. Then, to ensure completeness, our method was enhanced with two constraint-based algorithms for counterexample validation and refinement generation. Experimental results on SV-COMP 2017 benchmarks and two real-world server systems indicate that our method is promising and significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art tools.