Nested-unit Petri nets

Hubert Garavel (1, 2)

1 CONVECS - Construction of verified concurrent systems
2 Saarland University [Saarbrücken]

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.

Mots clés: CADP; concurrency theory; decision diagram; formal method; formal semantics; model checking; Petri net; process algebra; process calculus; verification

Domaines: Théorie et langage formel [cs.FL]; Langage de programmation [cs.PL]; Complexité [cs.CC]; Systèmes et contrôle [cs.SY]; Génie logiciel [cs.SE]

Hubert Garavel. Nested-unit Petri nets. Journal of Logical and Algebraic Methods in Programming, 2019, 104, pp.60-85. ⟨10.1016/j.jlamp.2018.11.005⟩. ⟨hal-02072190⟩