True Concurrency Can Be Easy

Abstract

Net bisimilarity is a behavioral equivalence for finite Petri nets, which is equivalent to structure-preserving bisimilarity [14] and causal-net bisimilarity [20], but with a much simpler definition, which is a smooth generalization of the definition of standard bisimilarity [26,24] on Labeled Transition Systems [15]. We show that it can be characterized logically by means of a suitable modal logic, called NML (acronym of net modal logic): two markings are net bisimilar if and only if they satisfy the same NML formulae.