From NuSMV to SPIN: Experiences with model checking flight guidance systems

Model checking has become a promising technique for verifying software and hardware designs; it has been routinely used in hardware verification, and a number of case studies and industrial applications show its effectiveness in software verification as well. Nevertheless, most existing model checkers are specialized for limited aspects of a system, where each of them requires a certain level of expertise to use the tool in the right domain in the right way. Hardly any guideline is available on choosing the right model checker for a particular problem domain, which makes adopting the technique difficult in practice, especially for verifying software with high complexity.