L'être humain fait des erreurs, en particulier dans la réalisation de taches complexes comme la construction des systèmes informatiques modernes. Nous nous intéresserons dans cette thèse à la vérification assistée par ordinateur du bon fonctionnement des systèmes informatiques. Les systèmes informatiques actuels sont de grande complexité. Afin de garantir leur fiabilité, la vérification automatique est une alternative au 'testing' et à la simulation. Elle propose d'utiliser des ordinateurs pour explorer exhaustivement l'ensemble des états du système, ce qui est problématique: même des systèmes assez simples peuvent atteindre un grand nombre d'états. L'utilisation des bonnes représentations des espaces d'états est essentielle pour surmonter la complexité des problèmes posés en vérification automatique. La vérification des systèmes concurrents amène des difficultés additionnelles, car l'analyse doit, en principe, examiner tous les ordres possibles d'exécution des actions concurrentes. Le dépliage des réseaux de Petri est une technique largement étudiée pour la vérification des systèmes concurrents. Il représentent l'espace d'états du système par un ordre partiel, ce qui se révèle aussi naturel qu'efficace pour la vérification automatique. Nous nous intéressons à la vérification des systèmes concurrents modélisés par des réseaux de Petri, en étudiant deux techniques remarquables de vérification: le 'model checking' et le diagnostic. Nous étudions les dépliages des réseaux de Petri étendus avec des arcs de lecture. Ces dépliages, aussi appelés dépliages contextuels, semblent être une meilleure représentation des systèmes contenant des actions concurrentes qui lisent des ressources partagées : ils peuvent être exponentiellement plus compacts dans ces cas. Ce travail contient des contributions théoriques et pratiques. Dans un premier temps, nous étudions la construction des dépliages contextuels, en proposant des algorithmes et des structures de données pour leur construction efficace. Nous combinons les dépliages contextuels avec les 'merged process', une autre représentation des systèmes concurrents qui contourne l'explosion d'états dérivée du non-déterminisme. Cette nouvelle structure, appelée 'contextual merged process', est souvent exponentiellement plus compacte, ce que nous montrons expérimentalement. Ensuite, nous nous intéressons à la vérification à l'aide des dépliages contextuels. Nous traduisons vers SAT le problème d'atteignabilité des dépliages contextuels, en abordant les problèmes issus des cycles de conflit asymétrique. Nous introduisons également une méthode de diagnostic avec des hypothèses d'équité, cette fois pour des dépliages ordinaires. Enfin, nous implémentons ces algorithmes dans le but de produire un outil de vérification compétitif et robuste. L'évaluation de nos méthodes sur un ensemble d'exemples standards, et leur comparaison avec des techniques issues des dépliages ordinaires, montrent que la vérification avec des dépliages contextuels est plus efficace que les techniques existantes dans de nombreux cas. Ceci suggère que les dépliages contextuels, et les structures d'évènements asymétriques en général, méritent une place légitime dans la recherche en concurrence, également du point de vu de leur efficacité. / Humans make mistakes, especially when faced to complex tasks, such as the construction of modern hardware or software. This thesis focuses on machine-assisted techniques to guarantee that computers behave correctly. Modern computer systems are large and complex. Automated formal verification stands as an alternative to testing or simulation to ensuring their reliability. It essentially proposes to employ computers to exhaustively check the system behavior. Unfortunately, automated verification suffers from the state-space explosion problem: even relatively small systems can reach a huge number of states. Using the right representation for the system behavior seems to be a key step to tackle the inherent complexity of the problems that automated verification solves. The verification of concurrent systems poses additional issues, as their analysis requires to evaluate, conceptually, all possible execution orders of their concurrent actions. Petri net unfoldings are a well-established verification technique for concurrent systems. They represent behavior by partial orders, which not only is natural but also efficient for automatic verification. This dissertation focuses on the verification of concurrent systems, employing Petri nets to formalize them, and studies two prominent verification techniques: model checking and fault diagnosis. We investigate the unfoldings of Petri nets extended with read arcs. The unfoldings of these so-called contextual nets seem to be a better representation for systems exhibiting concurrent read access to shared resources: they can be exponentially smaller than conventional unfoldings on these cases. Theoretical and practical contributions are made. We first study the construction of contextual unfoldings, introducing algorithms and data structures that enable their efficient computation. We integrate contextual unfoldings with merged processes, another representation of concurrent behavior that alleviates the explosion caused by non-determinism. The resulting structure, called contextual merged processes, is often orders of magnitude smaller than unfoldings, as we experimentally demonstrate. Next, we develop verification techniques based on unfoldings. We define SAT encodings for the reachability problem in contextual unfoldings, thus solving the problem of detecting cycles of asymmetric conflict. Also, an unfolding-based decision procedure for fault diagnosis under fairness constraints is presented, in this case only for conventional unfoldings. Finally, we implement our verification algorithms, aiming at producing a competitive model checker intended to handle realistic benchmarks. We subsequently evaluate our methods over a standard set of benchmarks and compare them with existing unfolding-based techniques. The experiments demonstrate that reachability checking based on contextual unfoldings outperforms existing techniques on a wide number of cases. This suggests that contextual unfoldings, and asymmetric event structures in general, have a rightful place in research on concurrency, also from an efficiency point of view.

Humans make mistakes, especially when faced to complex tasks, such as the construction of modern hardware or software. This thesis focuses on machine-assisted techniques to guarantee that computers behave correctly. Modern computer systems are large and complex. Automated formal verification stands as an alternative to testing or simulation to ensuring their reliability. It essentially proposes to employ computers to exhaustively check the system behavior. Unfortunately, automated verification suffers from the state-space explosion problem: even relatively small systems can reach a huge number of states. Using the right representation for the system behavior seems to be a key step to tackle the inherent complexity of the problems that automated verification solves. The verification of concurrent systems poses additional issues, as their analysis requires to evaluate, conceptually, all possible execution orders of their concurrent actions. Petri net unfoldings are a well-established verification technique for concurrent systems. They represent behavior by partial orders, which not only is natural but also efficient for automatic verification. This dissertation focuses on the verification of concurrent systems, employing Petri nets to formalize them, and studies two prominent verification techniques: model checking and fault diagnosis. We investigate the unfoldings of Petri nets extended with read arcs. The unfoldings of these so-called contextual nets seem to be a better representation for systems exhibiting concurrent read access to shared resources: they can be exponentially smaller than conventional unfoldings on these cases. Theoretical and practical contributions are made. We first study the construction of contextual unfoldings, introducing algorithms and data structures that enable their efficient computation. We integrate contextual unfoldings with merged processes, another representation of concurrent behavior that alleviates the explosion caused by non-determinism. The resulting structure, called contextual merged processes, is often orders of magnitude smaller than unfoldings, as we experimentally demonstrate. Next, we develop verification techniques based on unfoldings. We define SAT encodings for the reachability problem in contextual unfoldings, thus solving the problem of detecting cycles of asymmetric conflict. Also, an unfolding-based decision procedure for fault diagnosis under fairness constraints is presented, in this case only for conventional unfoldings. Finally, we implement our verification algorithms, aiming at producing a competitive model checker intended to handle realistic benchmarks. We subsequently evaluate our methods over a standard set of benchmarks and compare them with existing unfolding-based techniques. The experiments demonstrate that reachability checking based on contextual unfoldings outperforms existing techniques on a wide number of cases. This suggests that contextual unfoldings, and asymmetric event structures in general, have a rightful place in research on concurrency, also from an efficiency point of view.