In this paper we deal with verification of safety properties of term-rewriting systems. The verification problem is translated to a purely logical problem of finding a finite countermodel for a first-order formula, which is further resolved by a generic finite model finding procedure. A finite countermodel produced during successful verification provides with a concise description of the system invariant sufficient to demonstrate a specific safety property. We show the relative completeness of this approach with respect to the tree automata completion technique. On a set of examples taken from the literature we demonstrate the efficiency of finite model finding approach as well as its explanatory power.
@InProceedings{lisitsa:LIPIcs.RTA.2012.225, author = {Lisitsa, Alexei}, title = {{Finite Models vs Tree Automata in Safety Verification}}, booktitle = {23rd International Conference on Rewriting Techniques and Applications (RTA'12)}, pages = {225--239}, series = {Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)}, ISBN = {978-3-939897-38-5}, ISSN = {1868-8969}, year = {2012}, volume = {15}, editor = {Tiwari, Ashish}, publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik}, address = {Dagstuhl, Germany}, URL = {https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.RTA.2012.225}, URN = {urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-34959}, doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.RTA.2012.225}, annote = {Keywords: term-rewriting systems, safety verification, first-order logic, finite model finding} }
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