Model-checking CTL* over flat Presburger counter systems

Abstract

This paper studies model-checking of fragments and extensions of CTL* on infinitestate counter systems, where the states are vectors of integers and the transitions are determined by means of relations definable within Presburger arithmetic. In general, reachability properties of counter systems are undecidable, but we have identified a natural class of admissible counter systems (ACS) for which we show that the quantification over paths in CTL* can be simulated by quantification over tuples of natural numbers, eventually allowing translation of the whole Presburger-CTL* into Presburger arithmetic, thereby enabling effective model checking. We provide evidence that our results are close to optimal with respect to the class of counter systems described above.