McMillan's Complete Prefix for Contextual Nets
P. Baldan (1),
A. Corradini (2),
B. König(3),
S. Schwoon(4)
(1) Dipartimento di Matematica Pura e Applicata, Università di Padova, Italia.
(2) Dipartimento di Informatica, Università di Pisa, Italia.
(3)Institut für Informatik und interaktive Systeme,
Universität Duisburg-Essen, Germany.
(4)Technische Universität München, Germany.
Abstract:
In a seminal paper, McMillan proposed a technique for constructing a
finite complete prefix of the unfolding of bounded (i.e.,
finite-state) Petri nets, which can be used for verification purposes.
Contextual nets are a generalisation of Petri nets suited to model
systems with read-only access to resources. When working with
contextual nets, a finite complete prefix can be obtained by
applying McMillan's construction to a suitable encoding of the
contextual net into an ordinary net.
However, it has been observed that if the unfolding is itself a
contextual net, then the complete prefix can be significantly
smaller than the one obtained with the above technique. A
construction for generating such a contextual complete prefix has
been proposed for a special class of nets, called read-persistent.
In this paper we propose an algorithm that works for arbitrary
semi-weighted, bounded contextual nets. The construction explicitly
takes into account the fact that, unlike in ordinary or
read-persistent nets, an event can have several different histories
in general contextual net computations.