A new heuristic method for solving the minimum initial marking problem of Petri nets

The paper proposes a novel heuristic algorithm FMDB for the minimum initial marking problem MIM of Petri nets: "Given a Petri net and a firing count vector X, find an initial marking M, with the minimum total token number, for which there is a sequence /spl delta/ of transitions such that each transition t appears exactly X(t) times in /spl delta/, the first transition is firable on M and the rest can be fired one by one subsequently". Experimental results show that FMDB produces better solutions than any known algorithm.