Two subclasses of Petri nets and the analysis of their structural properties

A new approach, based on eigenvalues, for the study of some structural properties of Petri nets is given in this paper. Two subclasses, first defined by Holt and Commoner (1970) and studied by Lien (1976), are considered. The results on structural boundedness, liveness, repetitiveness, conservativeness, consistency, and well-structuredness of these two subclasses follow from the computation of eigenvalues of a square matrix, known as an M-matrix, obtained by a transformation of the classical incidence matrix.