Characteristics of a good model

Question

What are the Characteristics of a good model?

Answer 1

A model must include the most relevant information needed for determining whether the program properties being investigated hold in the target application.

Parts of the system that do not affect the outcome of the property verification can be excluded from the modeling phase. The dangers of getting the model wrong are obvious. If you exclude or abstract too much, you may get false positives or false negatives. If you leave in too much, the model checker spends most of its time checking unnecessary code, wasting precious time and memory.

There are several different approaches you can take to obtaining a model of the system. They are, in increasing order of preference:

• ?Manual model construction
• Model extraction
• ?The program as the model