Abstract
As a significant structural object, siphons are extensively employed to implement a large number of deadlock prevention and liveness-enforcing methods for flexible manufacturing systems modeled by Petri nets. By linear combinations, a set of elementary siphons is chosen from all strict minimal ones to be controlled and thus the structural complexity of a supervisor is greatly reduced. The concept of elementary siphons is originally proposed for ordinary Petri nets. When applied to generalized Petri nets, their selection and controllability require an additional study. In this work, the concept of augmented siphons is proposed to extend the application of the elementary ones to a class of generalized Petri nets, GLS(3)PR. Based on graph theory, a siphon extraction algorithm is developed to obtain all strict minimal siphons, from which augmented elementary ones are computed. In addition, the controllability conditions of dependent siphons are developed. Through fully investigating the net structure, especially weight information, the set of augmented elementary siphons is more compact and well suits for generalized Petri net models under consideration. Some examples are used to illustrate the proposed method.