From Counterexamples To Incremental Interactive Tracing Of Errors

This article summarizes the goals and the first results of the project CITE - from Counterexamples to Interactive Incremental Tracing of Errors - at the National Institute of Informatics (NII) in Tokyo, Japan. CITE aims at developing the fundamental methods for generating both comprehensive and comprehensible error reports based on model checking results. Model checking is a powerful and efficient method for finding flaws in hardware designs, object-oriented software, business processes, and hypermedia applications. One remaining major obstacle to a broader application of model checking is its limited usability for nonexperts. It requires much effort and insight to determine the root cause of errors from counterexamples generated by model checkers in the case of a specification violation. The CITE project addresses this problem by proposing tree structured error reports that can be refined successively to the desired level of detail according to the user's interest. First evaluations demonstrate that the proposed approach reveals more errors and explains the cause of errors more accurately than the counterexamples of existing model checkers.