An Approach to Distributed State Space Exploration for Coloured Petri Nets

We present an approach and associated computer tool support for conducting distributed state space exploration for Coloured Petri Nets (CPNs). The distributed state space exploration is based on the introduction of a coordinating process and a number of worker processes. The worker processes are responsible for the storage of states and the computation of successor states. The coordinator process is responsible for the distribution of states and termination detection. A main virtue of our approach is that it can be directly implemented in the existing single-threaded framework of Design/CPN and CPN Tools. This makes the distributed state space exploration and analysis largely transparent to the analyst. We illustrate the use of the developed tool on an example.