In: System Analysis - Modelling - Simulation (SAMS), pages 495-507. 1999.
Abstract: Many authors have given necessary and/or sufficient conditions for liveness in terms of deadlock-trap property for some classes of nets. However, very few attempts at finding deadlocks and traps in a given Petri net have been addressed so far. We present in this paper a new characterization, involving the incidence matrix, for finding all deadlocks (traps) of a Petri net. Consequences of this characterization include a simple algorithm for deciding whether a subset of places is a deadlock (trap) or not.
Keywords: Petri nets; structural analysis; deadlocks; traps.