Computer-based reduction technique for Petri nets

Abstract

Petri nets have become a useful tool for modelling various classes of system, especially concurrent systems. A Petri net model for a real-life system may become quite large in dimension (having a large number of reachable states and events) and it becomes quite difficult to analyse the net. In such a situation, a large net is reduced to nets and subnets of lower dimension (wherein desirable properties are preserved) which are subsequently analysed. The present paper proposes a computer-oriented hierarchical reduction technique for Petri nets utilizing a recently proposed reflexive incidence matrix representation. Given the incidence matrix representation of the net, the associated software developed for this purpose performs step-by-step reduction and produces a reduced net of smaller dimension suitable for analysis and related tasks.