Attacking Symbolic State Explosion

We propose a new symbolic model checking algorithm for parameterized concurrent systems modeled as (Lossy) Petri Nets, and (Lossy) Vector Addition Systems, based on the following ingredients: a rich assertional language based on the graph-based symbolic representation of upward-closed sets introduced in [DR00], the combination of the backward reachability algorithm of [ACJT96] lifted to the symbolic setting with a new heuristic rule based on structural properties of Petri Nets. We evaluate the method on several Petri Nets and parameterized systems taken from the literature [ABC+95,EM00,Fin93,MC99], and we compare the results with other finite and infinite-state verification tools.