Nested-Unit Petri Nets: A Structural Means to Increase Efficiency and Scalability of Verification on Elementary Nets

Hubert Garavel

Proceedings of the 36th International Conference on Application and Theory of Petri Nets and Concurrency (PETRI NETS'15), Brussels, Belgium, June 2015

This conference paper has been superseded by a journal article.

Abstract:

Petri nets can express concurrency and nondeterminism but not hierarchy. This article presents an extension of Petri nets, in which places can be grouped into so-called ``units'' expressing sequential components. Units can be recursively nested to reflect the hierarchical nature of complex systems. This model called NUPN (Nested-Unit Petri Nets) was originally developed for translating process calculi to Petri nets, but later found also useful beyond this setting. It allows significant savings in the memory representation of markings for both explicit-state and symbolic verification. Six tools already implement the NUPN model, which is also part of the next edition of the Model Checking Contest.

21 pages

PDF

PostScript

(Extended) slides of H. Garavel's lecture at the Petri Net 2015 conference

PDF

Slides of H. Garavel's lecture at OPCT'17 (Open Problems in Concurrency Theory)

PDF

ERRATA [September 17, 2018]

• In Definition 3, 8th item (definition of a reachable marking), replace:
  ... and n markings M₁, M₂, ..., M_n such that M₀ —t₁→ M₁ —t₂→ M₂ ... —t_n→ M_n.
  with:
  ... and n-1 markings M₁, M₂, ..., M_n-1 such that M₀ —t₁→ M₁ —t₂ → M₂ ... M_n-1 —t_n→ M.


• On the 2nd line of the proof of Proposition 4, replace:
  ... unit (u) ... unit (u')
  with:
  ... places (u) ... places (u')

ERRATA [November 22, 2018]

• On the 9th line of the proof of Proposition 8, replace:
  ... = disjoint (u₁, u₂) = false, since ...
  with:
  ... = disjoint (u₁, u₂) = true, since ...


• On the last line of the proof of Proposition 9, replace:
  ... = disjoint (u₁, u₂) = false, since ...
  with:
  ... = disjoint (u₁, u₂) = true, since ...