New reachability trees for unbounded Petri nets

Abstract

Reachability is an important dynamic property of Petri nets. Its determination given an unbounded net and initial marking has remained an open problem since 1960s. Due to its extreme difficulty, a great deal of research has been focused on some subclasses of unbounded nets. For arbitrary ones, this work intends to propose a new reachability tree (NRT), which consists of only but all reachable markings from its initial marking. Furthermore, an NRT-based method to decide deadlocks of unbounded nets is presented. An example is provided to show the new results.