Homing Sequence Derivation with Quantified Boolean Satisfiability

Homing sequence derivation for nondeterministic finite state machines (NFSMs) has important applications in system testing and verification. Unlike prior methods based on explicit tree based search, in this work we formulate the derivation of a preset homing sequence in terms of a quantified Boolean formula (QBF). The formulation allows implicit NFSM representation and compact QBF encoding for effective computation. Different encoding schemes and QBF solvers are evaluated for their suitability to homing sequence derivation. Experimental results show the generality and feasibility of the proposed method.