Methods for estimating state-space size of Petri nets

The authors present the results of an investigation of the relationships between a Petri net (PN) and the size of its associated state-space. Four estimators are developed for estimating the number of states in a PN and understanding the sensitivity of this number to increases in tokens, places, and transitions. An estimator for conservative PNs demonstrated excellent accuracy. Estimators based on place boundedness and net boundedness had poor performance, but were amenable to analytical sensitivity analysis