  In this paper, we study the interleaving -- or pure merge -- operator that
most often characterizes parallelism in concurrency theory. This operator is a
principal cause of the so-called combinatorial explosion that makes very hard -
at least from the point of view of computational complexity - the analysis of
process behaviours e.g. by model-checking. The originality of our approach is
to study this combinatorial explosion phenomenon on average, relying on
advanced analytic combinatorics techniques. We study various measures that
contribute to a better understanding of the process behaviours represented as
plane rooted trees: the number of runs (corresponding to the width of the
trees), the expected total size of the trees as well as their overall shape.
Two practical outcomes of our quantitative study are also presented: (1) a
linear-time algorithm to compute the probability of a concurrent run prefix,
and (2) an efficient algorithm for uniform random sampling of concurrent runs.
These provide interesting responses to the combinatorial explosion problem.
