Modular Reachability Analysis of Petri Nets for Multiagent Systems

Agent-based or multiagent-based methods have been used to solve a wide variety of problems. Multiagent nets are a variant of extended Petri nets, and they are a formal model-description language for multiagent systems. A system of interest can be simulated, and its properties can be checked by using a multiagent-net model. Reachability analysis is a powerful analysis method to check the reachability property of a system, but unfortunately, the complexity of reachability checking for general Petri nets is EXPSPACE-hard. Modular Petri nets have been proposed to describe discrete-event systems in a modular way. This paper performs a reachability analysis of multiagent nets by using modular Petri nets, proposes a set of transformation rules from a fundamental class of multiagent nets into modular Petri nets, and proves the isomorphism of the state spaces of the multiagent nets and of the generated modular Petri nets. Results of our empirical evaluations show the effectiveness of the proposed method.