How Petri Net Theory Serves Petri Net Model Checking: A Survey

Abstract

Structure theory is a unique treasure of the Petri net community. It was originally studied as a set of stand-alone techniques for exploring Petri net properties such as liveness, boundedness, reachability, and deadlock freedom. Today, methods based on the exploration of the reachability graph (state space methods) dominate Petri net verification. Thanks to the concept of model checking, these methods can deal with a much larger range of verification problems, and thanks to state space reduction methods (symmetries, partial order reduction, and other abstraction techniques), they became tractable for many practical applications. However, in the course of pushing model checking technology to its limits, several elements of Petri net structure theory celebrate a resurrection, being viewed from a different angle. This time, they are used for acceleration of the state space methods. In this article, we give an overview on the use of structural methods in Petri net model checking. We further report on our experience with combining state space and structural methods.