Reachability Analysis of Petri Nets

Abstract

Petri nets are one of the modeling languages of discrete event systems and concurrent systems. They were introduced by Dr. Carl Adam Petri in his Ph.D. thesis in 1962 and sice then, an enormous amount of theoretical and practical research has been carried our on them. The reachability problem is one of the fundamental problems in Petri nets. Although this problem is decidable, its computational complexity is exponential to the size of the Petri nets, making the analysis of various problems on Petri nets difficult. However, recent advances in computational capabilities and the development of various methods have enabled us to solve problems on Petri nets of a certain scale. This paper outlines the following recent methods used for the reachability problem: the symbolic state-space method, the unfolding method, the modular state-space method, and the method using model-checking tools.