Stubborn versus structural reductions for Petri nets

Abstract

Partial order and structural reduction techniques are some of the most beneficial methods for state space reduction in reachability analysis of Petri nets. This is among others documented by the fact that these techniques are used by the leading tools in the annual Model Checking Contest (MCC) of Petri net tools. We suggest improved versions of a partial order reduction based on stubborn sets and of a structural reduction with additional new reduction rules, and we extend both methods for the application on Petri nets with weighted arcs and weighted inhibitor arcs. All algorithms are implemented in the open-source verification tool TAPAAL and evaluated on a large benchmark of Petri net models from MCC'17, including a comparison with the tool LoLA (the last year winner of the competition). The experiments document that both methods provide significant state space reductions and, even more importantly, that their combination is indeed beneficial as a further nontrivial state space reduction can be achieved.