CONCUR 2006 – Concurrency Theory

Abstract

We propose a remedy to that part of the state-explosion problem for timed automata which is due to interleaving of actions. We prove the following quite surprising result: the union of all zones reached by different interleavings of the same set of transitions is convex. Consequently we can improve the standard reachability computation for timed automata by merging such zones whenever they are encountered. Since passage of time distributes over union, we can continue the successor computation from the new zone and eliminate completely the explosion due to interleaving.