Coverability and Termination in Recursive Petri Nets

Abstract

In the early two-thousands, Recursive Petri nets have been introduced in order to model distributed planning of multi-agent systems for which counters and recursivity were necessary. Although Recursive Petri nets strictly extend Petri nets and stack automata, most of the usual property problems are solvable but using non primitive recursive algorithms, even for coverability and termination. For almost all other extended Petri nets models containing a stack the complexity of coverability and termination are unknown or strictly larger than EXPSPACE. In contrast, we establish here that for Recursive Petri nets, the coverability and termination problems are EXPSPACE-complete as for Petri nets. From an expressiveness point of view, we show that coverability languages of Recursive Petri nets strictly include the union of coverability languages of Petri nets and context-free languages. Thus we get for free a more powerful model than Petri net.