239 research outputs found
Approximating Petri Net Reachability Along Context-free Traces
We investigate the problem asking whether the intersection of a context-free
language (CFL) and a Petri net language (PNL) is empty. Our contribution to
solve this long-standing problem which relates, for instance, to the
reachability analysis of recursive programs over unbounded data domain, is to
identify a class of CFLs called the finite-index CFLs for which the problem is
decidable. The k-index approximation of a CFL can be obtained by discarding all
the words that cannot be derived within a budget k on the number of occurrences
of non-terminals. A finite-index CFL is thus a CFL which coincides with its
k-index approximation for some k. We decide whether the intersection of a
finite-index CFL and a PNL is empty by reducing it to the reachability problem
of Petri nets with weak inhibitor arcs, a class of systems with infinitely many
states for which reachability is known to be decidable. Conversely, we show
that the reachability problem for a Petri net with weak inhibitor arcs reduces
to the emptiness problem of a finite-index CFL intersected with a PNL.Comment: 16 page
Petri nets for systems and synthetic biology
We give a description of a Petri net-based framework for
modelling and analysing biochemical pathways, which uni¯es the qualita-
tive, stochastic and continuous paradigms. Each perspective adds its con-
tribution to the understanding of the system, thus the three approaches
do not compete, but complement each other. We illustrate our approach
by applying it to an extended model of the three stage cascade, which
forms the core of the ERK signal transduction pathway. Consequently
our focus is on transient behaviour analysis. We demonstrate how quali-
tative descriptions are abstractions over stochastic or continuous descrip-
tions, and show that the stochastic and continuous models approximate
each other. Although our framework is based on Petri nets, it can be
applied more widely to other formalisms which are used to model and
analyse biochemical networks
On Petri Nets with Hierarchical Special Arcs
We investigate the decidability of termination, reachability, coverability and deadlock-freeness of Petri nets endowed with a hierarchy of places, and with inhibitor arcs, reset arcs and transfer arcs that respect this hierarchy. We also investigate what happens when we have a mix of these special arcs, some of which respect the hierarchy, while others do not. We settle the decidability status of the above four problems for all combinations of hierarchy, inhibitor, reset and transfer arcs, except the termination problem for two combinations. For both these combinations, we show that deciding termination is as hard as deciding the positivity problem on linear recurrence sequences -- a long-standing open problem
What makes petri nets harder to verify : stack or data?, Concurrency, security, and puzzles : Festschrift for A.W. Roscoe on the occasion of his 60th birthday
We show how the yardstick construction of Stockmeyer, also developed as counter bootstrapping by Lipton, can be adapted and extended to obtain new lower bounds for the coverability problem for two prominent classes of systems based on Petri nets: Ackermann-hardness for unordered data Petri nets, and Tower-hardness for pushdown vector addition systems
Context-Bounded Analysis For Concurrent Programs With Dynamic Creation of Threads
Context-bounded analysis has been shown to be both efficient and effective at
finding bugs in concurrent programs. According to its original definition,
context-bounded analysis explores all behaviors of a concurrent program up to
some fixed number of context switches between threads. This definition is
inadequate for programs that create threads dynamically because bounding the
number of context switches in a computation also bounds the number of threads
involved in the computation. In this paper, we propose a more general
definition of context-bounded analysis useful for programs with dynamic thread
creation. The idea is to bound the number of context switches for each thread
instead of bounding the number of switches of all threads. We consider several
variants based on this new definition, and we establish decidability and
complexity results for the analysis induced by them
- …