Model Checking ω-Regular Properties with Decoupled Search

Decoupled search is a state space search method originally introduced in AI Planning. Similar to partial-order reduction methods, decoupled search exploits the independence of components to tackle the state explosion problem. Similar to symbolic representations, it does not construct the explicit state space, but sets of states are represented in a compact manner, exploiting component independence. Given the success of both partial-order reduction and symbolic representations when model checking liveness properties, our goal is to add decoupled search to the toolset of liveness checking methods. Specifically, we show how decoupled search can be applied to liveness verification for composed Büchi automata by adapting, and showing correct, a standard algorithm for detecting lassos (i.e., infinite accepting runs), namely nested depth-first search. We evaluate our approach using a prototype implementation.