A Term Rewriting Approach to Analyze High Level Petri Nets

Abstract

High level Petri nets (HLPNs) have been widely applied to model concurrent and distributed systems in computer science and many other engineering disciplines. However, due to the expressive power of HLPNs, they are difficult to analyze. In recent years, a variety of new analysis techniques based on model checking have been proposed to analyze high level Petri nets in addition to the traditional analysis techniques such as simulation and reachability (coverability) tree. These new analysis techniques include (1) developing tailored model checkers for particular types of HLPNs or (2) leveraging existing general model checkers through model translation where a HLPN is transformed into an equivalent form suitable for the target model checker. In this paper, we present a term rewriting approach to analyze a particular type of HLPNs -- predicate transition nets (PrT nets). Our approach is completely automatic and implemented in our tool environment, where the frontend is PIPE+, a general graphical editor for creating PrT net models, and the backend is Maude, a well-known term rewriting system. We have applied our approach to the Mondex system -- the 1st pilot project of verified software repository in the worldwide software verification grand challenge, and several well-known problems used in the annual model checking contest of Petri net tools. Our initial experimental results are encouraging and demonstrate the usefulness of the approach.