A Performance Study of BDD-Based Model Checking

We present a study of the computational aspects of model checking based on binary decision diagrams (BDDs). By using a trace- based evaluation framework, we are able to generate realistic benchmarks and perform this evaluation collaboratively across several different BDD packages. This collaboration has resulted in significant performance improvements and in the discovery of several interesting characteristics of model checking computations. One of the main conclusions of this work is that the BDD computations in model checking and in building BDDs for the outputs of combinational circuits have fundamentally different performance characteristics. The systematic evaluation has also uncovered several open issues that suggest new research directions. We hope that the evaluation methodology used in this study will help lay the foundation for future evaluation of BDD-based algorithms.