Evaluating the Practical Impact of Parallelism in Asmeta

Parallelism is a key semantic feature of Abstract State Machines (ASMs), represented in the Asmeta tool set by the par construct, which enables synchronous execution of multiple rules. While its theoretical importance is firmly grounded in the ASM formalism, which models synchronous updates through parallel rule execution, an evaluation of its real usefulness in real-world models has received limited attention. This paper presents an experimental study evaluating how and when parallelism is effectively used in Asmeta. We analyzed existing specifications to measure the adoption of the par construct, and generated sequential variants replacing par with seq to compare behavior through randomized test suites. Our findings show that par is widely adopted and useful: it rather frequently produces results different from those obtained by sequential execution.