In: Proceedings of the 32nd Midwest Symposium on Circuits and Systems, 1989, Champaign, IL, USA, pages 406-409. Piscataway, NJ, USA: IEEE Service Center, 1990.
Abstract: The Petri net (PN) model of a resource-sharing concurrent system (RSCS) is conflict free when the firing of an enabled transition does not disable another transition in the net. The PN is fair when the firing of any transition more than a given number of times is a sufficient condition for all the transitions in the net to have fired. Although these concepts are not equivalent, it is shown that they are strongly related to each other when the PN model is live, bounded, and strongly connected. A computational method for finding conflicts is presented, and the concepts are illustrated with an example of buffer allocation in a sorting algorithm.
Keywords: fairness; conflict; resource-sharing concurrent system; live, bounded, strongly connected net; buffer allocation (in a) sorting algorithm.