Some issues in real-time systems verification using time Petri Nets

Abstract

Time Petri Net (TPN) models have been widely used to the specification and verification of real-time systems. However, the claim that most of these techniques are useful for real-time system verification can be discussed, based on two assumptions: i) to be suitable for real-time systems verification, a technique must be able to check timing properties, both safe and behavioral, and ii) the underlying algorithm must be efficient enough to be applied to complex systems design. In this paper we will discuss the suitability of commonly accepted verification techniques that use model-checking as a verification framework and TPN as a description model. We present a new algorithmic approach that allows computation of end-to-end time between activities over an abstract state space model. The proposed approach needs to compute the abstract state space only once improving the efficiency of the verification process and turning it suitable for large problems. We also introduce a new sufficient condition for abstract states space to preserve the branching time properties that yields more compact graphs than the condition already used in actual approaches. The approach would fit a design environment also based on Petri Nets called GHENeSys (General Hierarchical Enhanced Petri Nets). The results obtained, using our verification approach are compared with similar available approaches.