Detection and Elimination of Constants to Strengthen k-Induction

Abstract:
During the last years, software model checking has become a reliable technique for the verification of software that is used in safety-critical environments – e.g. to prove the absence of dead code. One technique to perform such proofs is k-induction which considers in its induction step the property and transition relation but ignores the initial states. Therefore, k-induction is very sensitive regarding the encoding of variables which have a constant value – in particular if the encoding depends on the initial states. A recent bachelor thesis addresses this problem. In this paper, we present the main results, describe the integration into the commercial test and verification tool BTC EmbeddedPlatform(r) and evaluate our implementation on a benchmark set with verification tasks originating from the automotive domain.