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Variable order metrics for decision diagrams in system verification

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Abstract

Decision diagrams (DDs) are widely used in system verification to compute and store the state space of finite discrete events dynamic systems (DEDSs). DDs are organized into levels, and it is well known that the size of a DD encoding a given set may be very sensitive to the order in which the variables capturing the state of the system are mapped to levels. Computing optimal orders is NP-hard. Several heuristics for variable order computation have been proposed, and metrics have been introduced to evaluate these orders. However, we know of no published evaluation that compares the actual predictive power for all these metrics. We propose and apply a methodology to carry out such an evaluation, based on the correlation between the metric value of a variable order and the size of the DD generated with that order. We compute correlations for several metrics from the literature, applied to many variable orders built using different approaches, for 40 DEDSs taken from the literature. Our experiments show that these metrics have correlations ranging from “very weak or nonexisting” to “strong.” We show the importance of highly correlating metrics on variable order heuristics, by defining and evaluating two new heuristics (an improvement of the well-known Force heuristic and a metric-based simulated annealing), as well as a meta-heuristic (that uses a metric to select the “best” variable order among a set of different variable orders).

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Notes

  1. It could be slightly less than 10,000, since the same permutation may be randomly generated multiple times, but this is extremely unlikely except for small models.

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Correspondence to Susanna Donatelli.

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This work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under Grant ACI-1642397.

Appendix: Weighted spearman correlation

Appendix: Weighted spearman correlation

We summarize the formulas used to compute the weighted Spearman correlation coefficient from a weighted bivariate series (XYW) used by the “wCorr” package [43]. A more detailed explanation can be found in [44]. The Pearson correlation coefficient \(\sigma _{P}(X,Y)\) is defined as \(\tfrac{\sigma _{X,Y}}{\sigma _X \sigma _Y}\) where \(\sigma _{X,Y}\) is the covariance between X and Y, and \(\sigma _X\) and \(\sigma _Y\) are the standard deviations of X and Y, respectively. The weighted Pearson correlation coefficient is defined as:

$$\begin{aligned} \sigma _{P}(X,Y,W)=\frac{\sum _{i=1}^n \left[ w_i (x_i-{\bar{x}})(y_i-{\bar{y}}) \right] }{\sqrt{\sum _{i=1}^n \left( w_i (x_i-{\bar{x}})^2 \right) \sum _{i=1}^n \left( w_i (y_i-{\bar{y}})^2 \right) }} ,\nonumber \\ \end{aligned}$$
(6)

where \({\bar{x}}\) and \({\bar{y}}\) are the weighted means of X and Y:

$$\begin{aligned} {\bar{x}}=\frac{1}{\sum _{i=1}^n w_i}\sum _{i=1}^n w_i x_i, \qquad {\bar{y}}=\frac{1}{\sum _{i=1}^n w_i}\sum _{i=1}^n w_i y_i , \end{aligned}$$

using \(w_i\) as the weights. The Spearman coefficient \(\sigma _{S}(X,Y)\) is defined as the Pearson coefficient over the ranks \(X'\) and \(Y'\) of X and Y, i.e., the values of X and Y are replaced with their relative position. The weighted Spearman coefficient \(\sigma _{S}(X,Y,W)\) is computed as the weighted Pearson coefficient \(\sigma _{P}(X',Y',W)\) where \(X'\) and \(Y'\) are the weighted ranks \(X'\) and \(Y'\) of X and Y, defined so that the j-th element of X has rank

$$\begin{aligned} \textit{rank}_j = \sum _{\begin{array}{c} x_k \in X' \\ x_k < x_j \end{array}} w_k ~+~ \frac{n_j + 1}{2} {\bar{w}}_jS, \end{aligned}$$

where \(n_j\) is the number of entries in X having value \(x_j\), and \({\bar{w}}_j\) is the average weight of those entries. The weighted ranks \(Y'\) of Y are defined analogously. Note that \(\sigma _{S}(X,Y,W)\) equals \(\sigma _{S}(X,Y)\) when all weights W are equal.

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Amparore, E.G., Donatelli, S. & Ciardo, G. Variable order metrics for decision diagrams in system verification. Int J Softw Tools Technol Transfer 22, 541–562 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10009-019-00522-6

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