Verification of Unbounded Client-Server Systems with Distinguishable Clients

Abstract

Client-server systems are a computing paradigm in concurrent and distributed systems. We deal with unbounded client-server systems (UCS) where all clients are of the same type, interact with a single server and they may enter and exit the system dynamically. At any point in time, the number of clients is bounded, but their exact number is unknown and dynamic. To model these systems, simple Petri nets are not directly usable, so we use unbounded $\nu$-nets. Owing to the distinguishability of clients in UCS, it is not straightforward to express their properties in LTL or CTL. To address this, we propose the logic $\mathsf{FOTL_1}$, a monodic fragment of Monadic First Order Temporal Logic (MFOTL). In this work, we provide the SMT encodings of $\nu$-nets and $\mathsf{FOTL_1}$ to do Bounded Model Checking (BMC). We also build an accompanying open source tool to perform BMC of UCS.