The Reachability Problem for Petri Nets Is Not Elementary

Petri nets, also known as vector addition systems, are a long established model of concurrency with extensive applications in modeling and analysis of hardware, software, and database systems, as well as chemical, biological, and business processes. The central algorithmic problem for Petri nets is reachability: whether from the given initial configuration there exists a sequence of valid execution steps that reaches the given final configuration. The complexity of the problem has remained unsettled since the 1960s, and it is one of the most prominent open questions in the theory of verification. Decidability was proved by Mayr in his seminal STOC 1981 work, and, currently, the best published upper bound is non-primitive recursive Ackermannian of Leroux and Schmitz from Symposium on Logic in Computer Science 2019. We establish a non-elementary lower bound, i.e., that the reachability problem needs a tower of exponentials of time and space. Until this work, the best lower bound has been exponential space, due to Lipton in 1976. The new lower bound is a major breakthrough for several reasons. Firstly, it shows that the reachability problem is much harder than the coverability (i.e., state reachability) problem, which is also ubiquitous but has been known to be complete for exponential space since the late 1970s. Secondly, it implies that a plethora of problems from formal languages, logic, concurrent systems, process calculi, and other areas, which are known to admit reductions from the Petri nets reachability problem, are also not elementary. Thirdly, it makes obsolete the current best lower bounds for the reachability problems for two key extensions of Petri nets: with branching and with a pushdown stack. We develop a construction that uses arbitrarily large pairs of values with ratio R to provide zero testable counters that are bounded by R. At the heart of our proof is then a novel gadget, the so-called factorial amplifier that, assuming availability of counters that are zero testable and bounded by k, guarantees to produce arbitrarily large pairs of values whose ratio is exactly the factorial of k. Repeatedly composing the factorial amplifier with itself by means of the former construction enables us to compute, in linear time, Petri nets that simulate Minsky machines whose counters are bounded by a tower of exponentials, which yields the non-elementary lower bound. By refining this scheme further, we, in fact, already establish hardness for h-exponential space for Petri nets with h + 13 counters.

Automated summary

Petri nets, also known as vector addition systems, are a well-established model of concurrency with extensive applications in various fields. The central algorithmic problem for Petri nets is reachability, which remains a prominent open question in the theory of verification. Recent research has established a non-elementary lower bound for the reachability problem, showing that it is much harder than previously thought and has implications for a wide range of related problems.