Extreme symmetries in complex distributed systems: the bag-oriented approach

Model checking is widely used as an automatic exhaustive verification technique to check properties of complex systems. However, it is difficult to operate in the context of today's emerging systems that combine distribution (and asynchronous communications) together with a large size (and a hierarchical composition of components --- and thus, of specifications). This paper combines existing techniques tackling the known combinatorial explosion of model checking. To achieve this, we exploit the structure of such distributed systems (symmetries and hierarchical composition), thus allowing a better compression factor and calculus factorization in favorable cases. We present these techniques and assess their impact on some benchmark examples.