Algorithmique et complexité des systèmes à compteurs
One fundamental aspect of computer systems, and in particular of critical systems, is the ability to run simultaneously many processes sharing resources. Such concurrent systems only work correctly when their behaviours are independent of any execution ordering. For this reason, it is particularly difficult to ensure the correctness of concurrent systems.  In this thesis, we study formal verification, an algorithmic approach to the verification of concurrent systems based on mathematical modeling. We consider two of the most prominent models, Petri nets and vector addition systems, and their usual verification problems considered in the literature.  We show that the reachability problem for vector addition systems (with states) restricted to two counters is PSPACE-complete, that is, it is complete for the class of problems solvable with a polynomial amount of memory. Hence, we establish the precise computational complexity of this problem, left open for more than thirty years.  We develop a new approach to the coverability problem for Petri nets which is primarily based on applying forward coverability in continuous Petri nets as a pruning criterion inside a backward coverability framework. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by implementing it in a tool named QCover.  We complement these results with a study of well-structured transition systems which form a general abstraction of vector addition systems and Petri nets. We consider infinitely branching well-structured transition systems, a class that includes Petri nets with special transitions that may consume or produce arbitrarily many tokens. We develop mathematical tools in order to study these systems and we delineate the decidability frontier for the termination, boundedness, maintainability and coverability problems.
formal verification computational complexity algorithmics Petri nets vector addition systems well-structured transition systems reachability problem coverability problem infinite branching