Dynamic Slicing of Petri Nets Based on Structural Dependency Graph and its Application in System Analysis

Petri net models are frequently complex and difficult to understand and modify. Slicing technology is very useful in analyzing programs, and has been widely used in specification level for model reduction. So it is necessary to explore slicing methods for Petri nets. This paper proposes a dynamic slicing technique for Petri nets based on the structural dependency graph (SDG). Firstly, the SDG is constructed from the slicing criterion by a backtracking algorithm. Secondly, based on the SDG and a given marking, the dynamic slice can be acquired. As a case study, the proposed method is applied to a control system, and a simulation tool is developed for validating this method and automatically generating the slice. The algorithms can be useful in automatically identifying the parts of the model that affect a state of interest, and provide the basic technical support for alleviating the difficulty of formal verification and analysis.