Adapting Petri Nets Reductions to Promela Specifications
Résumé
The interleaving of concurrent processes actions leads to the well-known combinatorial explosion problem. Petri nets theory provides some structural reductions to tackle this phenomenon by agglomerating sequences of transitions into a single atomic transition. These reductions are easily checkable and preserve deadlocks, Petri nets liveness and any LTL formula that does not observe the modified transitions. Furthermore, they can be combined with other kinds of reductions such as partial-order techniques to improve the efficiency of state space reduction. We present in this paper an adaptation of these reductions for Promela specifications and propose simple rules to automatically infer atomic steps in the Promela model while preserving the checked property. We demonstrate on typical examples the efficiency of this approach and propose some perspectives of this work in the scope of software model checking.