Comparison of Expressiveness for Timed Automata and Time Petri Nets

In this paper we consider the model of Time Petri Nets (TPN) “à la Merlin” where a time interval is associated with the firing of a transition, but we extend it with open intervals. We also consider Timed Automata (TA) as defined by Alur & Dill. We investigate some questions related to expressiveness for these models : we study the impact of slight variations of semantics for TPN and we compare the expressive power of TA and TPN, with respect to both time language acceptance and weak time bisimilarity. We prove that TA and bounded TPNs (enlarged with strict constraints) are equivalent w.r.t. timed language equivalence, providing an efficient construction of a TPN equivalent to a TA. We then exhibit a TA A such that no TPN (even unbounded) is weakly bisimilar to A. Because of this last result, it is natural to try and identify the (strict) subclass of TA that is equivalent to TPN w.r.t. weak timed bisimilarity. Thus we give some further results: 1) we characterize the subclass TA of TA that is equivalent to the original model of TPN as defined by Merlin, i.e. restricted to closed intervals, 2) we show that the associated membership problem for TA is PSPACE-complete and 3) we prove that the reachability problem for TA is also PSPACE-complete.