Many practical communication protocols provide priority service as well as ordinary service. In such a protocol, the protocol machines can initiate a priority service at most of the states. This characteristic leads an extreme increment of the number of state transitions on the protocol machines and causes state space explosion in verification of safety property of the protocol. This paper describes a method of constructing a communication protocol from composition of a subprotocol for ordinary service and that for priority service. This paper also presents a sufficient condition for a composed protocol to inherit safety property from the subprotocols. By using the composition method and the sufficient condition, the decision problem for safety property of the composed protocol can be reduced to those of the subprotocols. An experimental result of verification of a part of OSI session protocol is also described. The result shows that the method can reduce the computation time for verifying safety property to about 3% against the naive way.

Recently, Burch et al. proposed symbolic model checking method to verify sequential machines formally. The method, which is based on logic function manipulation using binary decision diagram, can handle large sequential machines that cannot be handled by the conventional techniques. The expressive power of Computational Tree Logic (CTL), which was used by Burch et al., is not very powerful, for example, CTL cannot describe repetition of events. This papers shows an extension of the symbolic model checking algorithm to Branching time regular temporal logic (BRTL), which has been proposed by the authors as an improvement of CTL in terms of expressive power. The implemented verifier based on the proposed algorithm could verify behaviors of a microprocessor composed of approximately 1,600 gates and 68 flipflops.