Structuring Acyclic Petri Nets for Reachability Analysis and Control

The incidence matrices—from places to transitions and vice versa—of an acyclic Petri net can obtain a block-triangular structure by reordering their rows and columns. This allows the efficient solution of some reachability problems for acyclic Petri nets. This result is further used in supervisory control of Petri nets; supervisors for Petri nets with uncontrollable transitions are constructed by extending the method of Yamalidou et al. (1996) to Petri nets where transitions can be executed simultaneously. A large class of Petri nets with uncontrollable transitions is given for which the maximally permissive supervisor can be realized by a Petri net. The original specification is algorithmically transformed—by using the results for acyclic Petri nets—into a new specification to take the presence of uncontrollable transitions into account. The supervisor is obtained by simple matrix multiplications and no linear integer programs need to be solved. Furthermore, a class of Petri nets is given for which the supervisor can be realized by extending the enabling rule with OR-logic.