Industrial temporal languages like PSL/Sugar and ForSpec have augmented the language with Regular Expressions (REs). An RE specification represents a sequence of Boolean events a model may or may not exhibit. A common way of using REs for specification is in a negative way: a not RE! property describes an undesirable behavior of the model. A not r! formula has the nature that it is sufficient to find one execution path of the model satisfying r in order to conclude the formula does not hold in the model. This nature allows a not r! formula to be modeled by a non-deterministic finite automaton (NFA) Nr, which accepts sequences satisfying r, and which is linear in the size of r. In this paper we discuss the translation of a not RE! into an NFA. While many translation methods exist in the literature ([12, 11]), to the best of our knowledge, the adoption of such a method to model-checking has never been explicitly discussed before. We present our method, which adopts that of Glushkov [11] to better suit model checking needs, and discuss its advantages.
By: Shoham Ben-David, Dana Fisman, Sitvanit Ruah
Published in: H-0229 in 2004
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