Scalable Formal Verification of Modular Concurrent Systems: A Survey of Techniques, Tools and Challenges

The increasing complexity of distributed and con-current systems raises pressing challenges for ensuring correctness and reliability. Formal verification, and in particular model checking, offers a rigorous foundation to validate system properties, yet suffers from the well-known state space explosion problem. This difficulty is especially acute in modular architectures, where local behaviors intertwine with synchronization across components. This paper provides a structured survey of the main techniques designed to overcome these challenges, including state space reduction, abstraction, compositional reasoning, symbolic approaches, and distributed verification. We also review representative tools such as SPIN, NuSMV, LTSmin, DiVinE, and STORM, assessing their capabilities and limitations in handling modular and concurrent models. Building on this landscape, we position the Reduced Distributed State Space (RDSS) as a novel framework that addresses key scalability limits. RDSS reduces global complexity into module-specific meta-graphs, ensures stuttering equivalence, and enables local model checking without exploring the full global state space. Comparative experiments demonstrate significant gains over existing approaches, particularly for systems where modules are not all synchronized on the same transitions. We conclude by identifying open challenges and future research directions, including distributed implementations, AI-driven heuristics, and hybrid reductions. Our survey underscores the importance of structural awareness in modern verification workflows and establishes RDSS as a promising foundation for scalable verification of modular concurrent systems.

@article{Khlifa2025,
  title     = {Scalable Formal Verification of Modular Concurrent Systems: A Survey of Techniques, Tools and Challenges},
  journal   = {International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications},
  volume    = {16},
  number    = {9},
  year      = {2025},
  publisher = {The Science and Information Organization},
  author    = {Sawsen Khlifa and Chiheb Ameur Abid and Asma ben Letaifa and Belhassen Zouari},
  doi       = {10.14569/IJACSA.2025.0160982},
  url       = {https://doi.org/10.14569/IJACSA.2025.0160982}
}