Linear templates of ACTL formulas with an application to SAT-based verification

ACTL formulas with linear counterexamples have been studied and the templates of ACTL formulas for which linear counterexamples exist have been identified. This paper further studies ACTL formulas having linear counterexamples in light of bounded semantics, and an application of this to SAT-based verification (in particular, bounded correctness checking) of ACTL properties is developed. In addition to the analysis on the semantic aspects, one goal is to provide a good solution to embedding the subset of ACTL that has linear counterexamples into an existing verification approach of ACTL. Due to that ECTL formulas are dual to ACTL formulas, we develop a refined bounded semantics for ECTL for the purpose of showing unsatisfiability of ACTL properties. Experimental data and experimental comparison are reported.