Structural translation from Time Petri Nets to Timed Automata

Abstract

In this paper, we consider Time Petri Nets (TPN) where time is associated with transitions. We give a formal semantics for TPNs in terms of Timed Transition Systems. Then, we propose a translation from TPNs to Timed Automata (TA) that preserves the behavioral semantics (timed bisimilarity) of the TPNs. For the theory of TPNs this result is twofold: (i) reachability problems and more generally TCTL model-checking are decidable for bounded TPNs; (ii) allowing strict time constraints on transitions for TPNs preserves the results described in (i). The practical applications of the translation are: (i) one can specify a system using both TPNs and Timed Automata and a precise semantics is given to the composition; (ii) one can use existing tools for analyzing timed automata (like K ronos, U ppaal or C mc) to analyze TPNs. In this paper we describe the new feature of the tool R omeo that implements our translation of TPNs in the U ppaal input format. We also report on experiments carried out on various examples and compare the result of our method to state-of-the-art tool for analyzing TPNs.