Approaching the Coverability Problem Continuously

• Published in: Tools and Algorithms for the Construction and Analysis of Systems pp. 480 - 496
• Main Authors: Blondin, Michael, Finkel, Alain, Haase, Christoph, Haddad, Serge
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Berlin, Heidelberg Springer Berlin Heidelberg
• Series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science
• Subjects: Coverability Problem; Firing Sequence; Input Place; Pruning Criterion; Standard Benchmark
• ISBN: 9783662496732; 3662496739
• ISSN: 0302-9743; 1611-3349
• DOI: 10.1007/978-3-662-49674-9_28

The coverability problem for Petri nets plays a central role in the verification of concurrent shared-memory programs. However, its high EXPSPACE-complete complexity poses a challenge when encountered in real-world instances. In this paper, we develop a new approach to this problem which is primarily based on applying forward coverability in continuous Petri nets as a pruning criterion inside a backward-coverability framework. A cornerstone of our approach is the efficient encoding of a recently developed polynomial-time algorithm for reachability in continuous Petri nets into SMT. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on standard benchmarks from the literature, which shows that our approach decides significantly more instances than any existing tool and is in addition often much faster, in particular on large instances.