Unbounded product-form Petri nets
Computing steady-state distributions in infinite-state stochastic systems is in general a very dificult task. Product-form Petri nets are those Petri nets for which the steady-state distribution can be described as a natural product corresponding, up to a normalising constant, to an exponentiation of the markings. However, even though some classes of nets are known to have a product-form distribution, computing the normalising constant can be hard. The class of (closed) Π3-nets has been proposed in an earlier work, for which it is shown that one can compute the steady-state distribution efficiently. However these nets are bounded. In this paper, we generalise queuing Markovian networks and closed Π3-nets to obtain the class of open Π3-nets, that generate infinite-state systems. We show interesting properties of these nets: (1) we prove that liveness can be decided in polynomial time, and that reachability in live Π3-nets can be decided in polynomial time; (2) we show that we can decide ergodicity of such nets in polynomial time as well; (3) we provide a pseudo-polynomial time algorithm to compute the normalising constant.
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