Model checking and the mu-calculus
Erin E. Emerson · DIMACS series in discrete mathematics and theoretical computer science · 1997
There is a growing recognition of the need to apply formal mathematical methods in the design of "high confidence" computing systems. Such systems operate in safety critical contexts (e.g., air traffic control systems) or where errors could have major adverse economic consequences (e.g., banking networks). The problem is especially acute in the design of many reactive systems which must exhibit correct ongoing behavior, yet are not amenable to thorough testing due to their inherently nondeterministic nature. One useful approach for specifying and reasoning about correctness of such systems is temporal logic model checking, which can provide an efficient and expressive tool for automatic verification that a finite state system meets a correctness specification formulated in temporal logic. We describe model checking algorithms and discuss their application. To do this, we focus attention on a particularly important type of temporal logic known as the Mu-calculus.