Schedulability Analysis of Petri Nets Based on Structural Properties

A schedule of a Petri Net (PN) represents a set of firing sequences that can be infinitely repeated within a bounded state space, regardless of the outcomes of the nondeterministic choices. Schedulability analysis for a given PN answers the question whether a schedule exists in the reachability space of this net. This paper suggests a novel approach for schedulability analysis based solely on PN structure. It shows that unschedulability can be caused by a structural relation among transitions modelling nondeterministic choices. A method based on linear programming for checking this relation is proposed. This paper also presents a necessary condition for schedulability based on the rank of the incidence matrix of the underlying PN. These results shed a light on the sources of unschedulability often found in PN models of embedded multimedia systems.