First-order logic for safety verification of hedge rewriting systems

Abstract

In this paper we deal with verification of safety properties of hedge rewriting systems and their generalizations. The verification problem is translated to a purely logical problem of finding a finite countermodel for a first-order formula, which is further tackled by a generic finite model finding procedure. We show that the proposed approach is at least as powerful as the methods using regular invariants. At the same time the finite countermodel method is shown to be efficient and applicable to the wide range of systems, including the protocols operating on unranked trees.