On Fault Diagnosis of random Free-choice Petri Nets

This paper presents an on-line diagnosis algorithm for Petri nets where a priori probabilistic knowledge about the plant operation is available. We follow the method developed by Benveniste, Fabre, and Haar to assign probabilities to configurations in a net unfolding thus avoiding the need for randomizing all concurrent interleavings of transitions. We consider different settings of the diagnosis problem, including estimating the likelihood that a fault may have happened prior to the most recent observed event, the likelihood that a fault will have happened prior to the next observed event. A novel problem formulation treated in this paper considers deterministic diagnosis of faults that occurred prior to the most recent observed event, and simultaneous calculation of the likelihood that a fault will occur prior to the next observed event

Higher-Dimensional Timed Automata

We introduce a new formalism of higher-dimensional timed automata, based on van Glabbeek's higher-dimensional automata and Alur's timed automata. We prove that their reachability is PSPACE-complete and can be decided using zone-based algorithms. We also show how to use tensor products to combat state-space explosion and how to extend the setting to higher-dimensional hybrid automata

On partial order semantics for SAT/SMT-based symbolic encodings of weak memory concurrency

Concurrent systems are notoriously difficult to analyze, and technological advances such as weak memory architectures greatly compound this problem. This has renewed interest in partial order semantics as a theoretical foundation for formal verification techniques. Among these, symbolic techniques have been shown to be particularly effective at finding concurrency-related bugs because they can leverage highly optimized decision procedures such as SAT/SMT solvers. This paper gives new fundamental results on partial order semantics for SAT/SMT-based symbolic encodings of weak memory concurrency. In particular, we give the theoretical basis for a decision procedure that can handle a fragment of concurrent programs endowed with least fixed point operators. In addition, we show that a certain partial order semantics of relaxed sequential consistency is equivalent to the conjunction of three extensively studied weak memory axioms by Alglave et al. An important consequence of this equivalence is an asymptotically smaller symbolic encoding for bounded model checking which has only a quadratic number of partial order constraints compared to the state-of-the-art cubic-size encoding.Comment: 15 pages, 3 figure

Isotactics as a foundation for alignment and abstraction of behavioral models

There are many use cases in business process management that require the comparison of behavioral models. For instance, verifying equivalence is the basis for assessing whether a technical workflow correctly implements a business process, or whether a process realization conforms to a reference process. This paper proposes an equivalence relation for models that describe behaviors based on the concurrency semantics of net theory and for which an alignment relation has been defined. This equivalence, called isotactics, preserves the level of concurrency of aligned operations. Furthermore, we elaborate on the conditions under which an alignment relation can be classified as an abstraction. Finally, we show that alignment relations induced by structural refinements of behavioral models are indeed behavioral abstractions

DPO Rewriting and Abstract Semantics via Opfibrations

AbstractThe classical DPO graph rewriting construction is re-expressed using the opfibration approach introduced originally for term graph rewriting. Using a skeleton category of graphs, a base of canonical graphs-in-context, with DPO rules as arrows, and with categories of redexes over each object in the base, yields a category of rewrites via the discrete Grothendieck construction. The various possible ways of combining rules and rewrites leads to a variety of functors amongst the various categories formed. Categories whose arrows are rewriting sequences have counterparts where the arrows are elementary event structures, and an event structure semantics for arbitrary graph grammars emerges naturally

Petri Games: Synthesis of Distributed Systems with Causal Memory

We present a new multiplayer game model for the interaction and the flow of information in a distributed system. The players are tokens on a Petri net. As long as the players move in independent parts of the net, they do not know of each other; when they synchronize at a joint transition, each player gets informed of the causal history of the other player. We show that for Petri games with a single environment player and an arbitrary bounded number of system players, deciding the existence of a safety strategy for the system players is EXPTIME-complete.Comment: In Proceedings GandALF 2014, arXiv:1408.556

Conflict vs causality in event structures

Event structures are one of the best known models for concurrency. Many variants of the basic model and many possible notions of equivalence for them have been devised in the literature. In this paper, we study how the spectrum of equivalences for Labelled Prime Event Structures built by Van Glabbeek and Goltz changes if we consider two simplified notions of event structures: the first is obtained by removing the causality relation (Coherence Spaces) and the second by removing the conflict relation (Elementary Event Structures). As expected, in both cases the spectrum turns out to be simplified, since some notions of equivalence coincide in the simplified settings; actually, we prove that removing causality simplifies the spectrum considerably more than removing conflict. Furthermore, while the labeling of events and their cardinality play no role when removing causality, both the labeling function and the cardinality of the event set dramatically influence the spectrum of equivalences in the conflict-free setting