International Journal of Mathematics and Mathematical Sciences
Volume 2004 (2004), Issue 57, Pages 3023-3036
doi:10.1155/S0161171204403378

Lower and upper bounds of shortest paths in reachability graphs

P. K. Mishra

Department of Applied Mathematics, Birla Institute of Technology, Mesra, Ranchi 835215, India

Received 22 March 2004

Copyright © 2004 P. K. Mishra. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

We prove the following property for safe marked graphs, safe conflict-free Petri nets, and live and safe extended free-choice Petri nets. We prove the following three results. If the Petri net is a marked graph, then the length of the shortest path is at most (|T|1)|T|/2. If the Petri net is conflict free, then the length of the shortest path is at most (|T|+1)|T|/2. If the petrinet is live and extended free choice, then the length of the shortest path is at most |T||T+1||T+2|/6, where T is the set of transitions of the net.