Testing experiments on unbounded systems: synchronizing sequences using Petri nets

Abstract Determining the state of a system when one does not know its current initial state is a very important problem in many practical applications as checking communication protocols, part orienteers, digital circuit reset etc. Synchronizing sequences have been proposed on 60's to solve the problem on systems modeled by finite state machines. This paper presents a first investigation of the synchronizing problem on unbounded systems, in particular synchronized Petri nets are taken into account. The proposed approach suffers from the fact that no finite space representation can exhaustively answer to the reachability problem. This problem is shown to be solved for some particular semantics.