Application of Petri net unfoldings to asynchronous design

An unfolding is a finite acyclic prefix of a Petri net behavior, which preserves all essential properties of the original Petri net, in particular all reachable markings of the net. An unfolding allows one to analyze partial orders between instances of places and events of the original net in a much simpler form due to absence of cycles. Cutoff criteria for truncating an infinite occurrence net into finite unfoldings are reviewed. We then show how unfoldings can be used for analysis of different properties of Petri nets: boundedness, safety, persistency, deadlocks, etc. Signal transition graphs are interpreted Petri nets widely used for specification and design of asynchronous control circuits. We show how unfoldings can be used at different stages of the design cycle.