Some results on the computation of minimal siphons in Petri nets

The problem addressed in th e paper is that of computing minimal siphons in standard Petri nets. In particular, some new theoretical results are stated and proved which aim at reducing the original problem to a set of smaller sub-problems. Based on that, a conceptual algorithm is proposed which efficiently computes a set of siphons containing the minimal siphons of a net. An experimental prototypical version of the proposed search algorithm has been developed and a campaign on a large set of random test instances has been carried out to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method.