Towards Completely Characterizing the Complexity of Boolean Nets Synthesis

Boolean nets are Petri nets that permit at most one token per place. Research has approached this important subject in many ways which resulted in various different classes of boolean nets. But yet, they are only distinguished by the allowed interactions between places and transitions, that is, the possible effects of firing transitions. There are eight different interactions: no operation (nop), input (inp), output (out), set, reset (res), swap, test of occupation (used), and test of disposability (free). Considering every combination for a possible net class yields 256 boolean classes in total. The synthesis problem for a particular class is to take an automaton A and compute a boolean net of that class that has a state graph isomorphic to A. To the best of our knowledge, the computational complexity of this problem has been analyzed for just two of the 256 classes, namely elementary nets systems (nop, inp, out), where the problem is NP-hard, and flip-flop nets (nop, inp, out, swap), which are synthesizable in polynomial time. However, depending on the desired net features, like read-only places, exception handling, or hierarchy, one has to synthesize nets with other interactions as for instance contextual nets (nop, inp, out, used, free) or trace nets (nop, inp, out, set, res, used, free). The contribution of this paper is a thorough investigation of the synthesis complexity for the 128 boolean net classes that allow nop. Our main result is a general proof scheme that identifies 77 NP-hard cases. All remaining 51 classes are shown to be synthesizable in polynomial time where 35 of them turn out to be trivial.Comment: Corrected a minor erro

Tracking Down the Bad Guys: Reset and Set Make Feasibility for Flip-Flop Net Derivatives NP-complete

Boolean Petri nets are differentiated by types of nets $\tau$ based on which of the interactions nop, inp, out, set, res, swap, used, and free they apply or spare. The synthesis problem relative to a specific type of nets $\tau$ is to find a boolean $\tau$-net $N$ whose reachability graph is isomorphic to a given transition system $A$. The corresponding decision version of this search problem is called feasibility. Feasibility is known to be polynomial for all types of flip flop derivates that contain at least the interactions nop, swap and an arbitrary selection of inp, out, used, free. In this paper, we replace inp and out by res and set, respectively, and show that feasibility becomes NP-complete for the types that contain nop, swap and a non empty selection of res, set and a non empty selection of used, free. The reduction guarantees a low degree for A's states and, thus, preserves hardness of feasibility even for considerable input restrictions.Comment: In Proceedings ICE 2019, arXiv:1909.0524

The Complexity of Synthesizing nop-Equipped Boolean Nets from g-Bounded Inputs (Technical Report)

Boolean Petri nets equipped with nop allow places and transitions to be independent by being related by nop. We characterize for any fixed natural number g the computational complexity of synthesizing nop-equipped Boolean Petri nets from labeled directed graphs whose states have at most g incoming and at most g outgoing arcs