Modular construction of finite and complete prefixes of Petri net unfoldings

This paper considers distributed systems, defined as a collection of components interacting through interfaces. Components, interfaces and distributed systems are modeled as Petri nets. It is well known that the unfolding of such a distributed system factorises, in the sense that it can be expressed as the composition of unfoldings of its components. This factorised form of the unfolding provides a more compact representation of the system trajectories, and makes it possible to analyse the system by parts. The paper focuses on the derivation of a finite and complete prefix (FCP) in the unfolding of a distributed system. Specifically, one would like to directly obtain such a FCP in factorised form, without computing first a FCP of the global distributed system and then factorising it. The construction of such a ldquomodular prefixrdquo is based on deriving summaries of component behaviours w.r.t. their interfaces, that are communicated to the neighbouring components. The latter integrate them to their local behaviours, and prepare interface summaries for the next components. This globally takes the form of a message passing algorithm, where the global system is never considered.