Compact Petri net representation for concurrent programs

Abstract

This paper presents a compact Petri net representation that is efficient to construct for concurrent programs that use explicit tasking and rendezvous style communication. These Petri nets are based on task interaction graphs and are called TIG-based Petri nets (TPN)s. They form a compact representation by summarizing the effects of large regions of a program and making useful information about those regions available for program analysis. We present a flexible framework for checking a variety of properties of concurrent programs using the reachability graph generated from a TPN. We present experimental results that demonstrate the benefit of TPNs over alternate Petri net representations and discuss the applicability of Petri net reduction techniques to TPNs.