  In this paper bounded model checking of asynchronous concurrent systems is
introduced as a promising application area for answer set programming. As the
model of asynchronous systems a generalisation of communicating automata,
1-safe Petri nets, are used. It is shown how a 1-safe Petri net and a
requirement on the behaviour of the net can be translated into a logic program
such that the bounded model checking problem for the net can be solved by
computing stable models of the corresponding program. The use of the stable
model semantics leads to compact encodings of bounded reachability and deadlock
detection tasks as well as the more general problem of bounded model checking
of linear temporal logic. Correctness proofs of the devised translations are
given, and some experimental results using the translation and the Smodels
system are presented.
