Improving the Accuracy of Petri Net-based Analysis of Concurrent Programs

Spurious results are an inherent problem of most static analysis methods. These methods, in an effort to produce conservative results, overestimate the executable behavior of a program. Infeasible paths and imprecise alias resolution are the two causes of such inaccuracies. In this paper we present an approach for improving the accuracy of Petri net-based analysis of concurrent programs by including additional program state information in the Petri net. We present empirical results that demonstrate the improvements in accuracy and, in some cases, the reduction in the search space that result from applying this approach to concurrent Ada programs

A Compact Petri Net Representation for Concurrent Programs

This paper presents a compact Petri net representation that is efficient to construct for concurrent programs that use explicit tasking and rendezvous style communication. These Petri nets are based on task interaction graphs and are called TIG-based Petri nets (TPN)s. They form a compact representation by abstracting large regions of program execution with associated summary information that is necessary for performing program analysis. We present a flexible framework for checking a variety of properties of concurrent programs using the reachability graph generated from a TPN. We present experimental results that demonstrate the benefit of TPNs over alternate Petri net representations and discuss the applicability of Petri net reduction techniques to TPNs. 1 This work was supported by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency under Grant MDA972-91-J-1009 and the Office of Naval Research under Grant N00014-90-J-1791. 1 Introduction An important goal of software engineering rese..

A Compact Petri Net Representation for Concurrent Programs

This paper presents a compact Petri net representation for concurrent programs. These Petri nets are based on task interaction graphs and, thus, are called TIG-based Petri nets (TPN)s. They form a compact representation by summarizing the effects of large sequential regions of a program and making useful information about those regions available for program analysis. TPNs and their associated analyses represent a tradeoff between encoding information about program behavior in the program representation or in the analysis algorithms. To evaluate the cost-effectiveness of this tradeoff, we have developed a flexible framework for checking a variety of properties of concurrent programs using the reachability graph generated from a TPN. We present empirical results that demonstrate the benefit of TPNs over alternate Petri net representations and discuss techniques to further reduce the cost of TPN-based analysis. 1 Introduction An important goal of software engineering research is to prov..

A Compact Petri Net Representation for Ada Tasking Programs

This paper presents a compact Petri net representation for concurrent programs with explicit tasking and rendezvous style communication that is efficient to construct. These Petri nets are based on task interaction graphs and are called TIG-based Petri nets (TPN)s. They form a compact representation by abstracting large regions of program execution and summarizing the information from those regions that is necessary for performing program analysis. We present a flexible framework for checking a variety of properties of concurrent programs using the reachability graph generated from a TPN. We also discuss the applicability of state space reduction techniques to TPNs. We present experimental results that demonstrate the benefit of TPNs over alternate Petri net representations