Dihomotopy as a tool in state space analysis:Tutorial

Recent geometric methods have been used in concurrency theory for quickly finding deadlocks and unreachable states. The reason why these methods are fast is that they contain in germ ingredients for tackling the state-space explosion problem. In this paper we show how this can be made formal. We also give som hints about the underlying algorithmics. Finally, we compare with other well-known methods for coping with the state-space explosion problem