Heuristic search for equivalence checking

Equivalence checking plays a crucial role in formal verification since it is a natural relation for expressing the matching of a system implementation against its specification. In this paper, we present an efficient procedure, based on heuristic search, for checking well-known bisimulation equivalences for concurrent systems specified through process algebras. The method tries to improve, with respect to other solutions, both the memory occupation and the time required for proving the equivalence of systems. A prototype has been developed to evaluate the approach on several examples of concurrent system specifications.