In computer science, model checking refers to the following problem: Given a model of a system, exhaustively and automatically check whether this model meets a given specification. Typically, the systems one has in mind are hardware or software systems, and the specification contains safety requirements such as the absence of deadlocks and similar critical states that can cause the system to crash. Model checking is a technique for automatically verifying correctness properties of finite-state systems.
In order to solve such a problem algorithmically, both the model of the system and the specification are formulated in some precise mathematical language: To this end, it is formulated as a task in logic, namely to check whether a given structure satisfies a given logical formula. The concept is general and applies to all kinds of logics and suitable structures. A simple model-checking problem is verifying whether a given formula in the propositional logic is satisfied by a given structure.
Read more about Model Checking: Overview, Algorithms, Tools
Famous quotes containing the word model:
“If the man who paints only the tree, or flower, or other surface he sees before him were an artist, the king of artists would be the photographer. It is for the artist to do something beyond this: in portrait painting to put on canvas something more than the face the model wears for that one day; to paint the man, in short, as well as his features.”
—James Mcneill Whistler (1834–1903)