The reachability problem for Petri nets is not elementary

Abstract

Petri nets, also known as vector addition systems, are a long established model of concurrency with extensive applications in modelling and analysis of hardware, software and database systems, as well as chemical, biological and business processes. The central algorithmic problem for Petri nets is reachability: whether from the given initial configuration there exists a sequence of valid execution steps that reaches the given final configuration. The complexity of the problem has remained unsettled since the 1960s, and it is one of the most prominent open questions in the theory of verification. Decidability was proved by Mayr in his seminal STOC 1981 work, and the currently best published upper bound is non-primitive recursive Ackermannian of Leroux and Schmitz from LICS 2019. We establish a non-elementary lower bound, i.e. that the reachability problem needs a tower of exponentials of time and space. Until this work, the best lower bound has been exponential space, due to Lipton in 1976. The new lower bound is a major breakthrough for several reasons. Firstly, it shows that the reachability problem is much harder than the coverability (i.e., state reachability) problem, which is also ubiquitous but has been known to be complete for exponential space since the late 1970s. Secondly, it implies that a plethora of problems from formal languages, logic, concurrent systems, process calculi and other areas, that are known to admit reductions from the Petri nets reachability problem, are also not elementary. Thirdly, it makes obsolete the currently best lower bounds for the reachability problems for two key extensions of Petri nets: with branching and with a pushdown stack.At the heart of our proof is a novel gadget so called the factorial amplifier that, assuming availability of counters that are zero testable and bounded by k, guarantees to produce arbitrarily large pairs of values whose ratio is exactly the factorial of k. We also develop a novel construction that uses arbitrarily large pairs of values with ratio R to provide zero testable counters that are bounded by R. Repeatedly composing the factorial amplifier with itself by means of the construction then enables us to compute in linear time Petri nets that simulate Minsky machines whose counters are bounded by a tower of exponentials, which yields the non-elementary lower bound. By refining this scheme further, we in fact establish hardness for h-exponential space already for Petri nets with h + 13 counters. *

Parameterized Analysis of Immediate Observation Petri Nets

“…The fundamental correctness problem for population protocols asks, given a protocol and a predicate, whether the protocol computes the predicate. This question was proved decidable in [12,13], but, unfortunately, the same papers also showed that the correctness problem is at least as hard as Petri net reachability, and so of non-elementary complexity [9].…”

Algorithmic Randomness in Continuous-Time Markov Chains

“…Rate-free chemical reaction networks, and Boolean transition systems more generally, raise significant and deep problems in distributed computing [10,3], but our focus here is on randomness, which we begin in the following section.…”

Continuous Reachability for Unordered Data Petri Nets is in PTime

“…It suffices to recall two results that were proved more than 30 years apart. An old but classical result by Lipton [5] shows that even coverability is ExpSpace-hard, while the non-elementary hardness of the reachability relation has just been established this year [6]. Moreover, when we look at Petri nets based formalisms that are needed to model various aspects of industrial systems, we see that they go beyond the expressivity of Petri Nets.…”