Efficient unfolding of contextual Petri nets (Q443729)

A contextual net is a Petri net extended with read arcs, which allows transitions to check for tokens without consuming them. This way, concurrent read access can be modelled directly. It is known that unfoldings of a contextual net can be exponentially more compact than those of a corresponding Petri net. This paper contributes two methods for computing contextual unfoldings and studies their efficiency. Experiments on a number of benchmark examples show that contextual unfoldings are not only smaller than unfoldings of corresponding Petri nets but can also be computed with the same or better efficiency.