STMC: Statistical model checker with stratified and antithetic sampling

N. Roohi, Y. Wang, M. West, G. E. Dullerud, and M. Viswanathan

in Proceedings of the 32nd International Conference on Computer-Aided Verification (CAV 2020), 2020.

STMC is a statistical model checker that uses antithetic and stratified sampling techniques to reduce the number of samples and, hence, the amount of time required before making a decision. The tool is capable of statistically verifying any black-box probabilistic system that PRISM can simulate, against probabilistic bounds on any property that PRISM can evaluate over individual executions of the system. We have evaluated our tool on many examples and compared it with both symbolic and statistical algorithms. When the number of strata is large, our algorithms reduced the number of samples more than 3 times on average. Furthermore, being a statistical model checker makes STMC able to verify models that are well beyond the reach of current symbolic model checkers. On large systems (up to 10^14 states) STMC was able to check 100% of benchmark systems, compared to existing symbolic methods in PRISM, which only succeeded on 13% of systems. The tool, installation instructions, benchmarks, and scripts for running the benchmarks are all available online as open source.

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-53291-8_23

Full text: RoWaWeDuVi2020.pdf