A Subclass of Petri Net with Reachability Equivalent to State Equation Satisfiability: Live Single Branch Petri Net

Petri Nets are a system description and analysis tool. Reachability is one of the most basic properties in Petri Net research. In a sense, reachability research is the foundation study for other dynamic properties of Petri Nets through which many problems involving Petri Nets can be described. Nowadays, there are two mature analysis methods–the matrix equation and the reachability tree. However, both methods are localized, i.e., it is difficult to find a general algorithm that can determine reachability for an arbitrary Petri Net, especially an unbounded Petri Net. This paper proposes and proves three propositions in order to present a subclass of a Petri Net, the live single-branch Petri Net, whose reachability is equivalent to the satisfiability of the state equation.