An emerging challenge for software engineering is the development of the methods and tools to aid design and analysis of concurrent and distributed software. Over the past few years, a number of analysis methods that focus on Ada tasking have been developed. Many of these methods are based on some form of reachability analysis, which has the advantage of being conceptually simple, but the disadvantage of being computationally expensive. We explore the effectiveness of various Petri net-based techniques for the automated deadlock analysis of Ada programs. Our experiments consider a variety of state space reduction methods both individually and in various combinations. The experiments are applied to a number of classical concurrent programs as well as a set of “real-world” programs. The results indicate that Petri net reduction and reduced state space generation are mutually beneficial techniques, and that combined approaches based on Petri net models are quite effective, compared to alternative analysis approaches.

Over the past few years, a number of research investigations have been initiated for static analysis of concurrent and distributed software. In this paper we report on experiments with various optimization techniques for reachability-based deadlock detection in Ada programs using Petri net models. Our experimental results show that various optimization techniques are mutually beneficial with respect to the effectiveness of the analysis.