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 particular, the paper discusses how integer programming techniques for Petri net models may be used to validate supervisors for the control of 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 inequalities that exactly defines the set of reachable markings. Finally, we show how important properties of discrete event systems, such as the absence of blocking states or controllability, may be analyzed by integer programming techniques