Spin Model Checker, The: Primer and Reference Manual

Chapter 2. Building Verification Models

	“Measure what is measurable, and make measurable what is not so.”
	--(Galileo Galilei, 1564–1642)

To verify a system we need to describe two things: the set of facts we want to verify, and the relevant aspects of the system that are needed to verify those facts. We investigate the types of facts we may want to prove about distributed systems in the next chapter. Here, we start with a gentle introduction to the art of describing distributed systems behavior at a relatively high level of abstraction, so that an automated verification of salient system facts becomes possible. We call such descriptions verification models.

SPIN

The tool that we will use to check verification models is called SPIN, and the specification ...