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 generalization of communicating automata, 1-safe Petri nets, are used. It is shown how a 1-safe Petri net and a requirement on the behavior 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

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... m. 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. Some experimental results on solving deadlock detection problems using the translation and the Smodels system are presented. This is an extended version of a paper titled "Answer Set Programming and Bounded Model Checking"[11] presented at