Looking at Computations from a Different Angle

Abstract

We present a novel framework to reason about programs based on encodings of computations as graphs. The main insight here is to rearrange the programs such that given a bound k, each computation can be explored according to any tree decomposition of width k of the corresponding behaviour graph. This produces under-approximations parameterized on k, which result in a complete method when we restrict to classes of behaviour graphs of bounded tree-width. As an additional feature, the transformation of the input program can be targeted to existing tools for the analysis, and thus, off-the-shelf tools based on fixed-point, or capable of analyzing sequential programs with scalar variables and nondeterminism, can be used.
To illustrate our approach, we develop this framework for sequential programs and discuss how to extend it to handle concurrency. For the case of sequential programs, we develop a compositional approach to generate on-the-fly tree decompositions of nested words, which is based on graph-summaries. To illustrate our technique, we also implement our algorithms for C programs.

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