Time Optimal Reachability Analysis Using Swarm Verification

Time optimal reachability analysis employs model-checking to compute goal states that can be reached from an initial state with a minimal accumulated time duration. The model-checker may produce a corresponding diagnostic trace which can be interpreted as a feasible schedule for many scheduling and planning problems, response time optimization etc. We propose swarm verification to accelerate time optimal reachability using the real-time model-checker Uppaal. In swarm verification, a large number of model checker instances execute in parallel on a computer cluster using different, typically randomized search strategies. We develop four swarm algorithms and evaluate them with four models in terms scalability, and time- and memory consumption. Three of these cooperate by exchanging costs of intermediate solutions to prune the search using a branch-and-bound approach. Our results show that swarm algorithms work much faster than sequential algorithms, and especially two using combinations of random-depth-first and breadth-first show very promising performance.