Nested-Units Petri Nets

Hubert Garavel

Journal of Logical and Algebraic Methods in Programming, vol. 104, pages 60-85, April 2019

Abstract:

Petri nets can express concurrency and nondeterminism but neither locality nor 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 both the concurrent and 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. Thirteen software tools already implement the NUPN model, which has also been adopted for the benchmarks of the Model Checking Contest (MCC) and the parallel problems of the Rigorous Examination of Reactive Systems (RERS) challenges.

51 pages

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

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