BigMC -- Bigraphical Model Checker

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1 Introduction

BigMC (Bigraphical Model Checker) is a model-checker designed to operate on Bigraphical Reactive Systems — BRS. BRS is a formalism developed by Robin Milner and colleagues that emphasises the orthogonal notions of locality and connectivity. Bigraphs have found applications in ubiquitous computing, computational biology, business workflow modelling, and context-aware systems.

By model checking, we mean precisely the act of checking whether some specification is true of a particular bigraphical model. This is achieved through a kind of exhaustive search of all the possible states of the system. For arbitrary models, this kind of checking is computationally intractible — the state space is simply too huge (and indeed infinite in many cases). The challenge of this kind of task is to limit the kinds of models we check to some tractible subset, and to reduce the number of actual states that we need to check directly in order to provide concrete correctness guarantees.

1.1 A cautionary note

BigMC is experimental software, still under active development. It might never be finished. It would be foolish to depend upon the kinds of guarantees that it can provide without considering exactly why these might be true.

1.2 About BigMC

BigMC is being developed at the IT University of Copenhagen by Gian Perrone in collaboration with Thomas Hildebrandt and Søren Debois.