Reduction rules for time Petri nets

The goal of net reduction is to increase the effectiveness of Petri-netbased real-time program analysis. Petri-net-based analysis, like all reachabilitybased methods, suffers from the state explosion problem. Petri net reduction is one key method for combating this problem. In this paper, we extend several rules for the reduction of ordinary Petri nets to work with time Petri nets. We introduce a notion of equivalence among time Petri nets, and prove that our reduction rules yield equivalent nets. This notion of equivalence guarantees that crucial timing and concurrency properties are preserved.