Some results on the computation of minimal siphons in Petri nets

Abstract

The problem addressed in the paper is that of computing minimal siphons in standard Petri nets. In particular, some new theoretical results are stated and proved which aim at reducing the original problem to a set of smaller sub-problems. Based on that, a conceptual algorithm is proposed which efficiently computes a set of siphons containing the minimal siphons of a net. An experimental prototypical version of the proposed search algorithm has been developed and a campaign on a large set of random test instances has been carried out to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method.