Structural liveness of petri nets is ExpSpace-hard and decidable

Place/transition Petri nets are a standard model for a class of distributed systems whose reachability spaces might be infinite. One of well-studied topics is verification of safety and liveness properties in this model; despite an extensive research effort, some basic problems remain open, which is exemplified by the complexity status of the reachability problem that is still not fully clarified. The liveness problems are known to be closely related to the reachability problem, and various structural properties of nets that are related to liveness have been studied. Somewhat surprisingly, the decidability status of the problem of determining whether a net is structurally live, i.e. whether there is an initial marking for which it is live, remained open for some time; e.g. Best and Esparza (Inf Process Lett 116(6):423–427, 2016. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ipl.2016.01.011) emphasize this open question. Here we show that the structural liveness problem for Petri nets is ExpSpace-hard and decidable. In particular, given a net N and a semilinear set S, it is decidable whether there is an initial marking of N for which the reachability set is included in S; this is based on results by Leroux (28th annual ACM/IEEE symposium on logic in computer science, LICS 2013, New Orleans, LA, USA, June 25–28, 2013, IEEE Computer Society, pp 23–32, 2013. https://doi.org/10.1109/LICS.2013.7)

Decidable Models of Recursive Asynchronous Concurrency

Asynchronously communicating pushdown systems (ACPS) that satisfy the empty-stack constraint (a pushdown process may receive only when its stack is empty) are a popular decidable model for recursive programs with asynchronous atomic procedure calls. We study a relaxation of the empty-stack constraint for ACPS that permits concurrency and communication actions at any stack height, called the shaped stack constraint, thus enabling a larger class of concurrent programs to be modelled. We establish a close connection between ACPS with shaped stacks and a novel extension of Petri nets: Nets with Nested Coloured Tokens (NNCTs). Tokens in NNCTs are of two types: simple and complex. Complex tokens carry an arbitrary number of coloured tokens. The rules of NNCT can synchronise complex and simple tokens, inject coloured tokens into a complex token, and eject all tokens of a specified set of colours to predefined places. We show that the coverability problem for NNCTs is Tower-complete. To our knowledge, NNCT is the first extension of Petri nets, in the class of nets with an infinite set of token types, that has primitive recursive coverability. This result implies Tower-completeness of coverability for ACPS with shaped stacks

A Framework to Synergize Partial Order Reduction with State Interpolation

We address the problem of reasoning about interleavings in safety verification of concurrent programs. In the literature, there are two prominent techniques for pruning the search space. First, there are well-investigated trace-based methods, collectively known as "Partial Order Reduction (POR)", which operate by weakening the concept of a trace by abstracting the total order of its transitions into a partial order. Second, there is state-based interpolation where a collection of formulas can be generalized by taking into account the property to be verified. Our main contribution is a framework that synergistically combines POR with state interpolation so that the sum is more than its parts