Abstract
Elementary siphons are useful in the development of a deadlock prevention policy for a discrete event system modeled with Petri nets. This paper proposes an algorithm to iteratively extract a set of elementary siphons in a class of Petri nets, called system of simple sequential processes with resources ((SPR)-P-3). At each iteration, by a mixed-integer programming (MIP) method, the proposed algorithm finds a maximal unmarked siphon, classifies the places in it, extracts an elementary siphon from the classified places, and adds a new constraint in order to extract the next elementary siphon. This algorithm iteratively executes until no new unmarked siphons can be found. It finally obtains a unique set of elementary siphons and avoids a complete siphon enumeration. A theoretical analysis and examples are given to demonstrate its efficiency and practical potentials.