An incremental approach to reachability analysis of distributed programs

Abstract

In this paper we present an incremental approach to reachability analysis of distributed programs with synchronous communication and mailbox naming. Each process in a distributed program can be modeled as a communicating finite state machine (CFSM). A set of CFSMs is organized into a hierarchy. We present an algorithm that, for a given hierarchy of a set M of CFSMs, incrementally composes and reduces subsets of CFSMs in M. This incremental reachability analysis guarantees the detection of global deadlocks. We provide an algorithm for selecting a hierarchy for a set of CFSMs and show an incremental analysis of the gas station problem.