A slicing-based approach to enhance Petri net reachability analysis

Abstract

Reachability graph analysis is one of the most widely used techniques to verify the behaviour of asynchronous and concurrent systems modeled in Petri nets. Unfortunately a state explosion problem is often the bottleneck when applying Petri net modeling and analysis to large and complex industrial systems. This paper proposes an approach in which Petri net slices are computed based on structural concurrency inherent in the P/T net and compositional reachability graph analysis is performed Petri net slices are proven to provide behavioural equivalence to P/T nets. This approach may enable verification of properties such as boundedness and liveness which may fail on unsliced P/T nets due to a state explosion problem. Effectiveness and scalability of our approach is demonstrated using both dining philosophers and feature interaction problems found in telecommunication software.