On Deadlockability, Liveness and Reversibility in Subclasses of Weighted Petri Nets

International audienceLiveness, (non-)deadlockability and reversibility are behavioral properties of Petri nets that are fundamental for many real-world systems. Such properties are often required to be mono-tonic, meaning preserved upon any increase of the marking. However, their checking is intractable in general and their monotonicity is not always satisfied. To simplify the analysis of these features, structural approaches have been fruitfully exploited in particular subclasses of Petri nets, deriving the behavior from the underlying graph and the initial marking only, often in polynomial time. In this paper, we further develop these efficient structural methods to analyze deadlockability, live-ness, reversibility and their monotonicity in weighted Petri nets. We focus on the join-free subclass, which forbids synchronizations, and on the homogeneous asymmetric-choice subclass, which allows conflicts and synchronizations in a restricted fashion. For the join-free nets, we provide several structural conditions for checking liveness, (non-)deadlock-ability, reversibility and their monotonicity. Some of these methods operate in polynomial time. Furthermore , in this class, we show that liveness, non-deadlockability and reversibility, taken together or separately, are not always monotonic, even under the assumptions of structural boundedness and structural liveness. These facts delineate more sharply the frontier between monotonicity and non-monotonicity of the behavior in weighted Petri nets, present already in the join-free subclass. In addition, we use part of this new material to correct a flaw in the proof of a previous characterization of monotonic liveness and boundedness for homogeneous asymmetric-choice nets, published in 2004 and left unnoticed

Proposition of an action layer for electrum

Electrum is an extension of Alloy that adds (1) mutable signatures and fields to the modeling layer; and (2) connectives from linear temporal logic (with past) and primed variables à la TLA+ to the constraint language. The analysis of models can then be translated into a SAT-based bounded model-checking problem, or to an LTL-based unbounded model-checking problem. Electrum has proved to be useful to model and verify dynamic systems with rich configurations. However, when specifying events, the tedious and sometimes error-prone handling of traces and frame conditions (similarly as in Alloy) remained necessary. In this paper, we introduce an extension of Electrum with a so-called “action” layer that addresses these questions.This work is financed by the ERDF - European Regional Development Fund - through the Operational Programme for Competitiveness and Internationalisation - COMPETE 2020 - and by National Funds through the Portuguese funding agency, FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, within project POCI-01-0145-FEDER016826, and the French Research Agency project FORMEDICIS ANR-16-CE25-000

Contribution to the study of weighted Petri nets

De nombreux systèmes réels et applications, tels que les ateliers flexibles et systèmes embarqués, sont formés de tâches communicantes et sont modélisables par des réseaux de Petri pondérés. Le comportement de ces systèmes peut être vérifié sur leur modèle dès la phase de conception afin d'éviter les simulations post-conception coûteuses. Ces systèmes doivent satisfaire trois propriétés : vivacité, capacité bornée et réversibilité. La vivacité préserve la possibilité d'exécuter chaque tâche. La capacité bornée assure une quantité limitée de ressources. La réversibilité évite une initialisation coûteuse et permet de réinitialiser le système. Les méthodes d'analyse de ces propriétés ont généralement une complexité exponentielle. Dans cette thèse, nous étudions plusieurs sous-classes expressives des réseaux de Petri pondérés, soient les classes Fork-Attribution, Choice-Free, Join-Free et Equal-Conflict, pour lesquelles nous développons les premiers algorithmes polynomiaux garantissant vivacité, capacité bornée et réversibilité. Premièrement, nous apportons des transformations polynomiales qui préservent de nombreuses propriétés des réseaux de Petri pondérés et facilitent l'étude de leur comportement. Deuxièmement, nous utilisons ces transformations pour obtenir plusieurs conditions polynomiales suffisantes de vivacité pour les sous-classes considérées. Enfin, ces transformations simplifient l'étude de la réversibilité sous hypothèse de vivacité. Nous donnons plusieurs caractérisations et conditions polynomiales suffisantes de réversibilité pour les sous-classes étudiées. Nos conditions passent à l'échelle et sont aisément implémentables dans les systèmes réels.Many real systems and applications, including flexible manufacturing systems and embedded systems, are composed of communicating tasks and may be modeled by weighted Petri nets. The behavior of these systems can be checked on their model early on at the design phase, thus avoiding costly simulations on the designed systems. Usually, the models should exhibit three basic properties: liveness, boundedness and reversibility.Liveness preserves the possibility of executing every task, while boundedness ensures that the operations can be performed with a bounded amount ofresources. Reversibility avoids a costly initialization phase and allows resets of the system.Most existing methods to analyse these properties have exponential time complexity.By focusing on several expressive subclasses of weighted Petri nets, namely Fork-Attribution, Choice-Free, Join-Free and Equal-Conflict nets,the first polynomial algorithms that ensure liveness, boundednessand reversibility for these classes have been developed in this thesis.First, we provide several polynomial time transformations that preserve structural andbehavioral properties of weighted Petri nets, while simplifying the study of their behavior.Second, we use these transformations to obtain several polynomial sufficient conditions of livenessfor the subclasses considered. Finally, the transformations also prove useful for the study of the reversibility propertyunder the liveness assumption. We provide several characterizations and polynomial sufficient conditionsof reversibility for the same subclasses. All our conditions are scalable and can be easily implemented in real systems

Contribution à l'étude des réseaux de Petri généralisés

Many real systems and applications, including flexible manufacturing systems and embedded systems, are composed of communicating tasks and may be modeled by weighted Petri nets. The behavior of these systems can be checked on their model early on at the design phase, thus avoiding costly simulations on the designed systems. Usually, the models should exhibit three basic properties: liveness, boundedness and reversibility.Liveness preserves the possibility of executing every task, while boundedness ensures that the operations can be performed with a bounded amount ofresources. Reversibility avoids a costly initialization phase and allows resets of the system.Most existing methods to analyse these properties have exponential time complexity.By focusing on several expressive subclasses of weighted Petri nets, namely Fork-Attribution, Choice-Free, Join-Free and Equal-Conflict nets,the first polynomial algorithms that ensure liveness, boundednessand reversibility for these classes have been developed in this thesis.First, we provide several polynomial time transformations that preserve structural andbehavioral properties of weighted Petri nets, while simplifying the study of their behavior.Second, we use these transformations to obtain several polynomial sufficient conditions of livenessfor the subclasses considered. Finally, the transformations also prove useful for the study of the reversibility propertyunder the liveness assumption. We provide several characterizations and polynomial sufficient conditionsof reversibility for the same subclasses. All our conditions are scalable and can be easily implemented in real systems.De nombreux systèmes réels et applications, tels que les ateliers flexibles et systèmes embarqués, sont formés de tâches communicantes et sont modélisables par des réseaux de Petri pondérés. Le comportement de ces systèmes peut être vérifié sur leur modèle dès la phase de conception afin d'éviter les simulations post-conception coûteuses. Ces systèmes doivent satisfaire trois propriétés : vivacité, capacité bornée et réversibilité. La vivacité préserve la possibilité d'exécuter chaque tâche. La capacité bornée assure une quantité limitée de ressources. La réversibilité évite une initialisation coûteuse et permet de réinitialiser le système. Les méthodes d'analyse de ces propriétés ont généralement une complexité exponentielle. Dans cette thèse, nous étudions plusieurs sous-classes expressives des réseaux de Petri pondérés, soient les classes Fork-Attribution, Choice-Free, Join-Free et Equal-Conflict, pour lesquelles nous développons les premiers algorithmes polynomiaux garantissant vivacité, capacité bornée et réversibilité. Premièrement, nous apportons des transformations polynomiales qui préservent de nombreuses propriétés des réseaux de Petri pondérés et facilitent l'étude de leur comportement. Deuxièmement, nous utilisons ces transformations pour obtenir plusieurs conditions polynomiales suffisantes de vivacité pour les sous-classes considérées. Enfin, ces transformations simplifient l'étude de la réversibilité sous hypothèse de vivacité. Nous donnons plusieurs caractérisations et conditions polynomiales suffisantes de réversibilité pour les sous-classes étudiées. Nos conditions passent à l'échelle et sont aisément implémentables dans les systèmes réels

On liveness and deadlockability in subclasses of weighted Petri nets

Structural approaches have greatly simplified the analysis of intractable properties in Petri nets, notably liveness. In this paper, we further develop these structural methods in particular weighted subclasses of Petri nets to analyze liveness and deadlockability, the latter property being a strong form of non-liveness. For homogeneous join-free nets, from the analysis of specific substructures, we provide the first polynomial-time characterizations of structural liveness and structural deadlockability, expressing respectively the existence of a live marking and the deadlockability of every marking. For the join-free class, assuming structural boundedness and leaving out the homogeneity constraint, we show that liveness is not monotonic, meaning not always preserved upon any increase of a live marking. Finally, we use this new material to correct a flaw in the proof of a previous characterization of monotonic liveness and boundedness for homogeneous asymmetric-choice nets, published in 2004 and left unnoticed.SCOPUS: cp.kinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishe

Analysis and Synthesis of Weighted Marked Graph Petri Nets

International audienceNumerous real-world systems can be modeled with Petri nets, which allow a combination of concurrency with synchronizations and conflicts. To alleviate the difficulty of checking their behaviour, a common approach consists in studying specific subclasses. In the converse problem of Petri net synthesis, a Petri net of some subclass has to be constructed efficiently from a given specification, typically from a labelled transition system describing the behaviour of the desired net. In this paper, we focus on a notorious subclass of persistent Petri nets, the weighted marked graphs (WMGs), also called generalised (or weighted) event (or marked) graphs or weighted T-nets. In such nets, edges have multiplicities (weights) and each place has at most one ingoing and one outgoing transition. Although extensively studied in previous works and benefiting from strong results, both their analysis and synthesis can be further investigated. To this end, we provide new conditions delineating more precisely their behaviour and give a dedicated synthesis procedure

Analysis and Synthesis of Weighted Marked Graph Petri Nets: Exact and Approximate Methods

International audienceNumerous real-world systems can be modeled with Petri nets, which allow a combination of concurrency with synchronizations and conflicts. To alleviate the difficulty of checking their behaviour, a common approach consists in studying specific subclasses. In the converse problem of Petri net synthesis, a Petri net of some subclass has to be constructed efficiently from a given specification, typically from a labelled transition system (lts) describing the behaviour of the desired net. In this paper, we focus on a notorious subclass of persistent Petri nets, the weighted marked graphs (WMGs), also called generalised (or weighted) event (or marked) graphs or weighted T-nets. In such nets, edges have multiplicities (weights) and each place has at most one ingoing and one outgoing transition. Although extensively studied in previous works and benefiting from strong results, both their analysis and synthesis can be further investigated. We provide new behavioural properties of WMGs expressed on their reachability graph, notably backward persistence and strong similarities between any two sequences sharing the same starting state and the same destination state. Besides, we design a general synthesis procedure aiming at the WMG class. Finally, when no solution to the synthesis problem exists, i.e., when the given lts is not WMG-solvable, we show how to construct a WMG whose reachability graph is a minimal over-approximation of the given lts

Synthesis of Weighted Marked Graphs from Constrained Labelled Transition Systems

International audienceRecent studies investigated the problems of analyzing Petri nets and synthesizing them from labelled transition systems (LTS) with two letters (transitions) only. In this paper, we extend these works by providing new characterizations for the synthesis of two-and three-letter Weighted Marked Graphs (WMGs), a well-known and useful class of weighted Petri nets in which each place has at most one input and one output. In this study, we focus mainly on LTS forming a single circuit. Also, we develop a sufficient condition of WMG-solvability for an arbitrary number of letters. Finally, we show that this sufficient condition is not necessary in the case of LTS forming a single circuit with five letters

Synthesis of Weighted Marked Graphs from Circular Labelled Transition Systems

International audienceSeveral works have proposed methods for the analysis and synthesis of Petri net subclasses from labelled transition systems (LTS). In this paper, we focus on Choice-Free (CF) Petri nets, in which each place has at most one output, and their subclass of Weighted Marked Graphs (WMGs). We provide new conditions for the WMG-synthesis from a circular LTS, i.e. forming a single circuit, and discuss the difficulties in extending these new results to the CF case