PETRI-NET STRUCTURAL-ANALYSIS FOR SUPERVISORY CONTROL

The primary motivation for this research is to show how Petri nets may be efficiently used within the framework of Supervisory Control. In p articular, the paper discusses how Integer Programming techniques for Petri net models may be used to validate supervisors for the control o f discrete event systems. We consider a class of Place/Transition nets , called Elementary Composed State Machines. The reachability problem for this class can be solved by a modification of classical incidence matrix analysis. In fact it is possible to derive a set of linear ineq ualities that exactly defines the set of reachable markings. Finally, we show how important properties of discrete event systems, such as th e absence of blocking states or controllability, may be analyzed by In teger Programming techniques.