Conditional interpolation: making concurrent program verification more effective

Due to the state-space explosion problem, efficient verification of real-world programs in large scale is still a big challenge. Particularly, thread alternation makes the verification of concurrent programs much more difficult since it aggravates this problem. In this paper, an application of Craig interpolation, namely conditional interpolation, is proposed to work together with CEGAR-based approach to reduce the state-space of concurrent tasks. Specifically, conditional interpolation is formalized to confine the reachable region of states so that infeasible conditional branches could be pruned. Furthermore, the generated conditional interpolants are utilized to shorten the interpolation paths, which makes the time consumed for verification significantly reduced. We have implemented the proposed approach on top of an open-source software model checker. Empirical results show that the conditional interpolation is effective in improving the verification efficiency of concurrent tasks.