Deadlock prevention using divide-and-conquer strategy for WS3PR

This work applies a divide-and-conquer strategy to handle deadlock prevention issues in a class of generalized Petri nets, WS³PR, an extended S3PR. And, the strategy is improved by utilizing a previous result of WS³PR, i.e., a WS³PR with a characteristic structure is inherently live at some proper initial markings. Given a marked WS³PR, after being divided into an idle subnet, an autonomous one, and some so-called toparchies, every toparchy is checked according to the result to decide whether it is inherently live at the current initial marking. This strategy for deadlock prevention in WS³PR can effectively reduce computational complexity, structural complexity, and improve system permissiveness. Some explanatory examples are used to illustrate this strategy.