Supervisory control of railway networks with Petri nets

We deal with the problem of designing control logic for railway networks using Petri nets. We first use the framework of supervisory control theory, taking into account the presence of uncontrollable and unobservable transitions, to derive a maximally permissive control policy that ensures safeness. The corresponding controller takes the form of monitor places, possibly with self-loops. In a second step, we investigate the liveness problem and present an heuristic technique based on structural analysis that, whenever applicable, leads to live models. As an example, we consider a segment of the railway network in Sardinia, Italy