Efficient deadlock prevention in Petri nets through the generation of selected siphons

Siphon-based control methods are often employed for deadlock prevention in Petri net models of flexible manufacturing systems. Such methods generally require siphon enumeration, which is a computationally intensive task, whose complexity grows with the Petri net size. However, only a small fraction of minimal siphons needs to be controlled to prevent all deadlocks. This paper introduces an algorithm to compute the required siphons, based on a set covering approach that optimally matches emptiable siphons to critical markings. This greatly reduces the computational load of the deadlock prevention algorithm with respect to alternative methods with comparable performance in terms of permissivity.