A Symbolic Reachability Graph for Coloured Petri Nets

Coloured Petri nets are well suited to the modelling of symmetric systems. Model symmetries can be usefully exploited for the sake of analysis efficiency as well as for modelling convenience. We present a reduced reachability graph called symbolic reachability graph that enjoys the following properties: (1) it can be constructed directly by an efficient algorithm without considering the actual state space of the model; (2) it can be substantially smaller than the ordinary reachability graph; (3) its analysis provides equivalent results as the analysis of the ordinary reachability graph. The construction procedure for the symbolic reachability graph is completely effective in the case of a syntactically restricted class of coloured nets called “wellformed nets”, while for the unrestricted case of coloured nets some procedures may not be easily implementable in algorithmic form.