English

Deciding Entailments in Inductive Separation Logic with Tree Automata

Logic in Computer Science 2014-02-12 v2

Abstract

Separation Logic (SL) with inductive definitions is a natural formalism for specifying complex recursive data structures, used in compositional verification of programs manipulating such structures. The key ingredient of any automated verification procedure based on SL is the decidability of the entailment problem. In this work, we reduce the entailment problem for a non-trivial subset of SL describing trees (and beyond) to the language inclusion of tree automata (TA). Our reduction provides tight complexity bounds for the problem and shows that entailment in our fragment is EXPTIME-complete. For practical purposes, we leverage from recent advances in automata theory, such as inclusion checking for non-deterministic TA avoiding explicit determinization. We implemented our method and present promising preliminary experimental results.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1402.2127,
  title  = {Deciding Entailments in Inductive Separation Logic with Tree Automata},
  author = {Radu Iosif and Adam Rogalewicz and Tomas Vojnar},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1402.2127},
  year   = {2014}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-22T03:04:45.652Z