On generating elementary T-invariants of Petri nets by linear programming

T-invariants represent periodic behaviors of Petri nets and elementary T-invariants represent fundamental periodic behaviors that cannot be divided into smaller ones. To reveal the dynamic behavior of a system modeled by a Petri net, generating elementary T-invariants is indispensable. For a given Petri net, there may be an enormous number of elementary T-invariants and so generally generating all the elementary T-invariants would take too much computation time and storage. In this paper, we discuss how to apply linear programming techniques to compute elementary T-invariants. As a result, we propose a new efficient method of computing all the elementary T-invariants of a given Petri net with less storage.