Parameterized model counting for string and numeric constraints

Abdulbaki Aydin, William Eiers, Lucas Bang, Tegan Brennan, Miroslav Gavrilov, Tevfik Bultan, Fang Yu

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

24 Scopus citations

Abstract

Recently, symbolic program analysis techniques have been extended to quantitative analyses using model counting constraint solvers. Given a constraint and a bound, a model counting constraint solver computes the number of solutions for the constraint within the bound. We present a parameterized model counting constraint solver for string and numeric constraints. We first construct a multi-track deterministic finite state automaton that accepts all solutions to the given constraint. We limit the numeric constraints to linear integer arithmetic, and for non-regular string constraints we over-approximate the solution set. Counting the number of accepting paths in the generated automaton solves the model counting problem. Our approach is parameterized in the sense that, we do not assume a finite domain size during automata construction, resulting in a potentially infinite set of solutions, and our model counting approach works for arbitrarily large bounds. We experimentally demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on a large set of string and numeric constraints extracted from software applications. We experimentally compare our tool to five existing model counting constraint solvers for string and numeric constraints and demonstrate that our tool is as efficient and as or more precise than other solvers. Moreover, our tool can handle mixed constraints with string and integer variables that no other tool can.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationESEC/FSE 2018 - Proceedings of the 2018 26th ACM Joint Meeting on European So ftware Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of So ftware Engineering
EditorsAlessandro Garci, Corina S. Pasareanu, Gary T. Leavens
Pages400-410
Number of pages11
ISBN (Electronic)9781450355735
DOIs
StatePublished - 26 Oct 2018
Event26th ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, ESEC/FSE 2018 - Lake Buena Vista, United States
Duration: 4 Nov 20189 Nov 2018

Publication series

NameESEC/FSE 2018 - Proceedings of the 2018 26th ACM Joint Meeting on European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering

Conference

Conference26th ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, ESEC/FSE 2018
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityLake Buena Vista
Period4/11/189/11/18

Keywords

  • Model counting
  • constraint solving
  • quantitative program analysis

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