Reversible computation deals with mechanisms for undoing the effects of actions executed by a dynamic system. This paper is concerned with reversibility in the context of Petri nets which are a general formal model of concurrent systems. A key construction we investigate amounts to adding 'reverse' versions of selected net transitions. Such a static modification can severely impact on the behaviour of the system, e.g., the problem of establishing whether the modified net has the same states as the original one is undecidable. We therefore concentrate on nets with finite state spaces and show, in particular, that every transition in such nets can be reversed using a suitable finite set of new transitions.
Recent studies investigated the problems of analysing Petri nets and synthesising them from labelled transition systems (LTS) with two labels (transitions) only. In this paper, we extend these works by providing new conditions for the synthesis of Weighted Marked Graphs (WMGs), a well-known and useful class of weighted Petri nets in which each place has at most one input and one output. Some of these new conditions do not restrict the number of labels; the other ones consider up to 3 labels. Additional constraints are investigated: when the LTS is either finite or infinite, and either cyclic or acyclic. We show that one of these conditions, developed for 3 labels, does not extend to 4 nor to 5 labels. Also, we tackle geometrically the WMG-solvability of finite, acyclic LTS with any number of labels.
When a Petri net system of some class is synthesised from a labelled transition system, it may be interesting to derive structural properties of the corresponding reachability graphs and to use them in a pre-synthesis phase in order to quickly reject inadequate transition systems, and provide fruitful error messages. The same is true for simultaneous syntheses problems. This was exploited for the synthesis of choicefree nets for instance, for which several interesting properties have been derived. We exhibit here a new property for this class, and analyse if this gets us closer to a full characterisation of choice-free synthesizable transition systems.
When a Petri net is synthesised from a labelled transition system, it is frequently desirable that certain additional constraints are fulfilled. For example, in circuit design, one is often interested in constructing safe Petri nets. Targeting such subclasses of Petri nets is not necessarily computationally more efficient than targeting the whole class. For example, targeting safe nets is known to be NP-complete while targeting the full class of place/transition nets is polynomial, in the size of the transition system. In this paper, several classes of Petri nets are examined, and their suitability for being targeted through efficient synthesis from labelled transition systems is studied and assessed. The focus is on choice-free Petri nets and some of their subclasses. It is described how they can be synthesised efficiently from persistent transition systems, summarising and streamlining in tutorial style some of the authors’ and their groups’ work over the past few years.
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