Hierarchical Reachability Graph Generation for Petri NetsPeter Buchholz

Reachability analysis is the most general approach to analyze Petri nets. Due to state space explosion , generation of the reachability set and reachability graph becomes intractable even for moderately sized nets with the known approaches. This paper presents a new method to generate and represent the reachability set and reachability graph of large Petri nets in a compositional and hierarchical way. The representation is related to previously known Kronecker based representations and it contains the complete information about reachable markings and possible transitions. The central idea of the new technique is a divide and conquer approach. Based on net-level results, nets are decomposed and reachability graphs for parts are generated and combined. The whole approach can be realized in a completely automated way and has been integrated in a Petri Net based analysis tool.