The ASCoVeCo State Space Analysis Platform: Next Generation Tool Support for State Space Analysis⋆ Invited Tutorial

State space analysis is one of the main approaches to model-based verification of concurrent systems and is one of the most successfully applied analysis methods for Coloured Petri Nets (CP-nets or CPNs) [13, 16, 17]. The basic idea of state space exploration and analysis is to compute all reachable states and state changes of the concurrent system under consideration and represent these as a directed graph. From a constructed state space it is possible to verify and analyse a large class of behavioural properties by considering, e.g., the standard behavioural properties of CP-nets, traverse a constructed state space by means of user-defined queries, or conduct LTL and CTL model checking [4, 10]. Another main advantage of state space analysis is that it can be supported by computer tools in a highly automatic way, and it can provide counter examples demonstrating why the system does not have a certain property. The main limitation of using state spaces to verify behavioural properties of systems is the state explosion problem [24], i.e., that state spaces of systems may have an astronomical number of reachable states which means that they are too large to be handled with the available computing power (CPU speed and memory). Methods for alleviating this inherent complexity problem is an active area of research and has led to the development of a large collection of state space reduction methods. These methods have significantly broadened the class of systems that can be verified and state spaces can now be used to verify systems of industrial size. Some of these methods [2, 15, 14, 25] have been developed in the context of the CPN modelling language. Other methods (e.g., [23, 22, 26, 11]) have been developed outside the context of the CPN modelling language, but state space reduction methods are generally independent of any concrete modelling language and hence also applicable for CP-nets. A computer tool supporting state spaces must implement a wide range of state space reduction methods since no single reduction method works well on all systems. Both CPN Tools [5] and its predecessor Design/CPN [6] have supported state space analysis in it most basic form and experimental prototype libraries have been developed supporting state space reduction methods such as the symmetry method [15, 18], the equivalence method [14, 19], time condensed state spaces [3], and the sweep-line method [2, 21]. The software architectures of CPN Tools and Design/CPN have, however, made it difficult to support a collection of state space reduction methods in a coherent manner in these tools. This tutorial presents the ASCoVeCo State Space Analysis Platform (ASAP) which is currently being developed in the context of the ASCoVeCo research project [1]. ASAP represents the next generation of tool support for state space exploration and analysis of CPN