ANALYSIS OF PRODUCTION SCHEMATA BY PETRI NETS

Petri nets provide a powerful graphical tool for representing and analyzing complex concurrent systems. Properties such as hang-up freeness, determinacy, conflict, concurrency and dependency, can be represented and studied. The precise relationship between structural and behavioral properties, and between local and global properties is not well-understood for the most general class of Petri Nets. This thesis presents such results for a restricted class of Petri Nets called Free Choice Petri Nets, and for a corresponding class of systems called Production Schemata. Results on structural constraints guaranteeing global operation, and decompositions of complex systems into meaningful parts, are also presented.