Our paper entitled "Computing Minimal Siphons in Petri Net Models of Resource Allocation Systems: An Evolutionary Approach" has been accepted for the International Workshop on Petri Nets and Software Engineering.

Abstract:

Petri Nets are graph based tools to model and study concurrent systems and their properties; one of them is {\em liveness}, which is related to the possibility of every part of the system to be activated eventually. Siphons are sets of places that have been related to liveness properties. When we need to deal with realistic problems its computation is hard or even impossible and this is why in this paper we are approaching it using evolutionary computation, a meta-heuristic that has proved it can successfully find solutions when the search space is big. In this work a formulation of the siphon property using linear constraints is presented for general Petri Nets. We will also present an evaluation for a family of resource allocation systems (RAS). The proposed solution is based on a genetic algorithm (GA); we will show how siphons can be computed using it, with experiments showing that in some cases they are able to find a few solutions in less time than previous deterministic algorithms.

It will appear soon in my Research Interests page, but if you can wait for a copy, just drop me an email.