Simplification of CTL Formulae for Efficient Model Checking of Petri Nets

We study techniques to overcome the state space explosion problem in CTL model checking of Petri nets. Classical state space pruning approaches like partial order reductions and structural reductions become less efficient with the growing size of the CTL formula. The reason is that the more places and transitions are used as atomic propositions in a given formula, the more of the behaviour (interleaving) becomes relevant for the validity of the formula. We suggest several methods to reduce the size of CTL formulae, while preserving their validity. By these methods, we significantly increase the benefits of structural and partial order reductions, as the combination of our techniques can achive up to 60% average reduction in formulae sizes. The algorithms are implemented in the open-source verification tool TAPAAL and we document the efficiency of our approach on a large benchmark of Petri net models and queries from the Model Checking Contest 2017.