Combining Local and Global Model Checking

The verification process of reactive systems in local model checking [1,7] and in explicit state model checking is[13,15] on-the-fly. Therefore only those states of a system have to be traversed that are necessary to prove a property. In addition, if the property does not hold, than often only a small subset of the state space has to be traversed to produce a counterexample. Global model checking [6,23] and, in particular, symbolic model checking [4,22] can utilize compact representations of the state space, e.g. BDDs [3], to handle much larger designs than what is possible with local and explicit model checking. We present a new model checking algorithm for LTL that combines both approaches. In essence, it is a generalization of the tableau construction of [1] that enables the use of BDDs but still is on-the-fly.