Deadlock detection of EFSMs using simultaneous reachability analysis

Simultaneous reachability analysis (SRA) is a recently proposed technique to alleviate the state space explosion problem in reachability analysis of concurrent systems. Its goal is to reduce the number of generated states while guaranteeing the detection of certain types of faults in the system such as deadlock and unexecutable transitions. The main idea of SRA is to allow a global transition in a reachability graph to contain a set of local transitions (i.e. transitions of individual processes) such that the state reached by the global transition is independent of the execution order of the associated local transitions. In this paper, we show how to apply the SRA approach to systems modeled as extended finite state machines (EFSM) with multiple ports. Empirical results from applying our SRA algorithm to the dining philosophers problem indicate that our algorithm reduces the number of generated states and the computation time by about 90%.