Section: New Results

Contextual Petri nets

Contextual nets are an extension of Petri nets that – unlike ordinary Petri nets – faithfully models concurrent read accesses to shared resources. This is not only interesting from a semantic but also from an algorithmic point of view, as the analysis of such nets can better exploit the fact that concurrent reads are independent and concurrent.

In particular, the unfolding of a contextual net may be up to exponentially smaller in certain situations. While the theoretical foundations of contextual unfoldings were established in [66] and [6] , it remained unclear whether the approach could be useful in practice.

Recent work on the theoretical foundations, as well as appropriate data structures and algorithms, has closed this gap. This underlying work has been presented at Concur'11 [53] and has resulted in an efficient tool [59] . More details can be found in a technical report [58] .

We are currently exploring applications of these techniques in the areas of verification, diagnosis, and planning. Some preliminary steps have been presented in [54] .