Reachability in Live and Safe Free-Choice Petri Nets is NP-Complete

The complexity of the reachability problem for live and safe free-choice Petri nets has been open for several years. Several partial results seemed to indicate that the problem is polynomial. We show that this is unlikely: the problem is NP-complete.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 1998
• Where: TCS
• Authors: Javier Esparza
• Keywords: Free-choice Petri Nets, Polynomial, Reachability Problem, TCS 1998, Theoretical Computer Science