Modular analysis of systems composed of semiautonomous subsystems

This paper reviews a proposal for the modu-lar analysis of Petri nets and its applicability to factory automation systems. It presents new al-gorithms to harness this modular analysis in the determination of reachable states with specied partial markings, to determine possible deadlocks, both global and local, and also liveness. These algorithms have been implemented in a prototype tool which has then been used to solve a problem in factory automation which, even for relatively sim-ple congurations, can lead to state spaces beyond the capabilities of many analysis tools. 1