Widening Polyhedra with Landmarks

Simon, Axel and King, Andy (2006) Widening Polyhedra with Landmarks. In: Fourth Asian Symposium on Programming Languages and Systems.

PDF
Download (325Kb)
[img]
Preview

Abstract

The abstract domain of polyhedra is sufficiently expressive to be deployed in verification. One consequence of the richness of this domain is that long, possibly infinite, sequences of polyhedra can arise in the analysis of loops. Widening and narrowing have been proposed to infer a single polyhedron that summarises such a sequence of polyhedra. Motivated by precision losses encountered in verification, we explain how the classic widening/narrowing approach can be refined by an improved extrapolation strategy. The insight is to record inequalities that are thus far found to be unsatisfiable in the analysis of a loop. These so-called landmarks hint at the amount of widening necessary to reach stability. This extrapolation strategy, which refines widening with thresholds, can infer post-fixpoints that are precise enough not to require narrowing. Unlike previous techniques, our approach interacts well with other domains, is fully automatic, conceptually simple and precise on complex loops.

Item Type: Conference or workshop item (Paper)
Additional information: See also http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/index.html
Uncontrolled keywords: abstract interpretation, polyhedral analysis, computational geometry
Subjects: Q Science > QA Mathematics (inc Computing science) > QA 76 Software, computer programming,
Divisions: Faculties > Science Technology and Medical Studies > School of Computing > Theoretical Computing Group
Depositing User: Mark Wheadon
Date Deposited: 24 Nov 2008 18:03
Last Modified: 06 Sep 2011 01:31
Resource URI: http://kar.kent.ac.uk/id/eprint/14391 (The current URI for this page, for reference purposes)
  • Depositors only (login required):