Some Complexity Results for Rings of Petri Nets

We define a subclass of Petri nets called m–state n–cycle Petri nets, each of which can be thought of as a ring of n bounded (by m states) Petri nets using n potentially unbounded places as joins. Let Ring(n, l, m) be the class of m–state n–cycle Petri nets in which the largest integer mentioned can be represented in l bits (when the standard binary encoding scheme is used). As it turns out, both the reachability problem and the boundedness problem can be decided in O(n(l+log m)) nondeterministic space. Our results provide a slight improvement over previous results for the so-called cyclic communicating finite state machines. We also compare and contrast our results with that of VASS(n, l, s), which represents the class of n-dimensional s-state vector addition systems with states where the largest integer mentioned can be described in l bits.