Canonical prefixes of Petri net unfoldings

In this paper, we develop a general technique for truncating Petri net unfoldings, parameterized according to the level of information about the original unfolding one wants to preserve. Moreover, we propose a new notion of completeness of a truncated unfolding. A key aspect of our approach is an algorithm-independent notion of cut-off events, used to truncate a Petri net unfolding. Such a notion is based on a cutting context and results in the unique canonical prefix of the unfolding. Canonical prefixes are complete in the new, stronger sense, and we provide necessary and sufficient conditions for its finiteness, as well as upper bounds on its size in certain cases. A surprising result is that after suitable generalization, the standard unfolding algorithm presented in [8], and the parallel unfolding algorithm proposed in [12], despite being non-deterministic, generate the canonical prefix. This gives an alternative correctness proof for the former algorithm, and a new (much simpler) proof for the latter one.

Authors and Affiliations

1. School of Computing Science, University of Newcastle, NE1 7RU, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK

   Victor Khomenko & Maciej Koutny

2. Institut für Informatik, Universität Augsburg, 86135, Augsburg, Germany

   Walter Vogler

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Victor Khomenko.

Received: 29 April 2003, Published online: 2 September 2003

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