High-Level Petri Net Model Checking with AlPiNA

摘要

Although model checking is heavily used in the hardware domain, it did not take off in software engineering yet. One of the possible reasons is that software models are very complex. They integrate many dimensions such as data types and concurrency, leading to the infamous state space explosion problem. This article introduces the Algebraic Petri Nets Analyzer (AlPiNA), a symbolic model checker for High-level Petri nets. It is comprised of two independent modules: a GUI plug-in for Eclipse and an underlying model checking engine. AlPiNA is a step towards performing efficient and user-friendly model checking of large software systems. This is achieved by separating the model and its properties from the optimisation artifacts. This article describes the features that AlPiNA provides to the user for designing models and verifying properties. It also presents the techniques and artifacts used for tuning verification performance, along with some theoretical background.