Inferring Empirical Sound Resource Bounds via Symbolic Execution and Linear Programming (Extended Version)

2026-08-12

AI Summary

Existing approaches to program resource analysis struggle to simultaneously achieve the completeness of static analysis and the worst-case coverage afforded by dynamic analysis. To address this limitation, this work proposes a hybrid analysis method that integrates dynamic symbolic execution with mixed-integer linear programming to systematically enumerate execution paths within a bounded input space and derive empirically sound upper bounds on maximum resource consumption. This approach represents the first deep integration of dynamic symbolic execution and linear programming for inferring tight and effective worst-case resource bounds for functional programs. The prototype tool CompAS demonstrates both practical utility and theoretical guarantees in estimating resource usage on complex programs.

Abstract

Existing approaches to resource analysis of programs can be classified into two main paradigms: static analysis and dynamic analysis methods. The former allow for formal guarantees but are inherently incomplete; the latter are widely applicable but may miss rare but characteristic (worst-case) scenarios and thus lack soundness. Hybrid approaches attempt to combine the strengths of both paradigms, thereby enabling the analysis of programs that are either too complex for purely static techniques or where dynamic approaches suffer from combinatorial explosion. In this paper, we present a novel hybrid approach that systematically derives upper bounds for the worst-case resource consumption of functional programs. Our method combines dynamic symbolic execution to exhaustively explore all possible computation paths within a constrained input space with mixed-integer linear programming to derive empirically sound upper bounds. We have implemented the methodology in a prototype tool, dubbed CompAS, which we made available on Zenodo.

Problem

• resource analysis
• worst-case resource consumption
• static analysis
• dynamic analysis
• hybrid approach

Innovation

• symbolic execution
• linear programming
• resource analysis
• hybrid approach
• worst-case bounds