Symbolic Localization Reduction with Reconstruction Layering and Backtracking

Localization reduction is an abstraction-refinement scheme for model checking which was introduced by Kurshan [12] as a means for tackling state explosion. It is completely automatic, but despite the work that has been done related to this scheme, it still suffers from computational complexity. In this paper we present algorithmic improvements to localization reduction that enabled us to overcome some of these problems. Namely, we present a new symbolic algorithm for path reconstruction including incremental refinement and backtracking. We have implemented these improvements and compared them to previous work on a large number of our industrial examples. In some cases the improvement was dramatic. Using these improvements we were able to verify circuits that we were not previously able to address.