Parameterized model checking is the problem of deciding if a given formula holds irrespective of the number of participating processes. A standard approach for solving the parameterized model checking problem is to reduce it to model checking finitely many finite-state systems. This work considers the theoretical power and limitations of this technique. We focus on concurrent systems in which processes communicate via pairwise rendezvous, as well as the special cases of disjunctive guards and token passing; specifications are expressed in indexed temporal logic without the next operator; and the underlying network topologies are generated by suitable formulas and graph operations. First, we settle the exact computational complexity of the parameterized model checking problem for some of our concurrent systems, and establish new decidability results for others. Second, we consider the cases where model checking the parameterized system can be reduced to model checking some fixed number of processes, the number is known as a cutoff. We provide many cases for when such cutoffs can be computed, establish lower bounds on the size of such cutoffs, and identify cases where no cutoff exists. Third, we consider cases for which the parameterized system is equivalent to a single finite-state system (more precisely a Büchi word automaton), and establish tight bounds on the sizes of such automata.
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