Compressed and Distributed File Formats for Labeled Transition Systems

Stefan Blom, Izak van Langevelde, Bert Lisser
2003 Electronical Notes in Theoretical Computer Science  
With model checking techniques growing towards maturity, the availability for standardised file formats for labeled transition systems is more important than ever. A number of requirements for file formats are introduced, based on requirements for software, databases and compression. Two candidate formats, SVC I and SVC II are introduced, with the former emphasising compression and the latter focusing on distributed access. The two formats are compared with existing file formats. 1 The issue of
more » ... file formats for models has been addressed before, but so far no file format has been developed which satisfies the requirements of being an open standard, allowing a compact representation and being specifically tailored towards model checking. The fc2 format [14] is well-documented, and the Aldébaran format [6] is self-explanatory, but both are text-based, without any compression. The binary coded graph (BCG) format [6] includes decent compression, but both the file format and the compression algorithm are proprietary. Also, well-known compression schemes like Gnu Zip [8] are general-purpose and lack provisions to read or write transitions one at a time. This paper makes an inventory of the requirements a suitable file format for model checking should satisfy, and presents two suitable candidate formats. The organisation of the paper is as follows. Section 2 proposes the requirements. Section 3 presents the SVC I format as a candidate. Section 4 presents the more sophisticated SVC II format for distributed settings, whose use is illustrated in Section 5. Section 6 evaluates the two formats and Section 7 takes stock.
doi:10.1016/s1571-0661(05)80097-0 fatcat:e4qxqhhl6nge5i2c3rioaz4api