Section: Overall Objectives

Highlights

The article "Synthesis and Analysis of Product-form Petri Nets" by Serge Haddad, Jean Mairesse and Hoang-Thach Nguyen received the Best Paper Award at the International Conference on Theory and Application of Petri Nets (ICATPN) 2011 in Newcastle, UK.

For a large Markovian model, a "product form" is an explicit description of the steady-state behaviour which is otherwise generally untractable. Being first introduced in queueing networks, it has been adapted to Markovian Petri nets. Here we address three relevant issues for product-form Petri nets which were left fully or partially open: (1) we provide a sound and complete set of rules for the synthesis; (2) we characterise the exact complexity of classical problems like reachability; (3) we introduce a new subclass for which the normalising constant (a crucial value for product-form expression) can be efficiently computed.