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Merged processes: a new condensed representation of Petri net behaviour

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Abstract

Model checking based on Petri net unfoldings is an approach widely applied to cope with the state space explosion problem. In this paper, we propose a new condensed representation of a Petri net’s behaviour called merged processes, which copes well not only with concurrency, but also with other sources of state space explosion, viz sequences of choices and non-safeness. Moreover, this representation is sufficiently similar to the traditional unfoldings, so that a large body of results developed for the latter can be re-used. Experimental results indicate that the proposed representation of a Petri net’s behaviour alleviates the state space explosion problem to a significant degree and is suitable for model checking.

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Correspondence to Victor Khomenko.

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V. Khomenko is a Royal Academy of Engineering/Epsrc Research Fellow supported by the RAEng/Epsrc grant EP/C53400X/1 (Davac).

M. Koutny is supported by the EC IST grant 511599 (Rodin).

W. Vogler is supported by the DFG-project STG-Dekomposition VO 615/7-1

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Khomenko, V., Kondratyev, A., Koutny, M. et al. Merged processes: a new condensed representation of Petri net behaviour. Acta Informatica 43, 307–330 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00236-006-0023-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00236-006-0023-y

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