Trace Based Reachability Verification for Statecharts

Statecharts are widely used to model the behavior of reactive systems. While this visual formalism makes modeling easier, the state of the art in verification of statechart specifications is far from satisfactory due to the state explosion problem. We present History Abstraction, a trace-based verification technique to address this problem. Given a set of traces in a statechart model, the model is abstracted to contain at most three states per statechart: current, history and future. A path to a desired state in the abstract model is a sketch of a potential path to that state in the original model. We follow an incremental concretization procedure to extend the sketch to a complete path in the original model. This paper presents our technique. Our experiments suggest that the technique scales to large industry models.