A timed Petri net, an extended model of an ordinary Petri net with introduction of discrete time delay in firing activity, is practically useful in performance evaluation of real-time systems and so on. Unfortunately though, it is often too difficult to solve (efficiently) even most basic problems in timed Petri net theory. This motivates us to do research on analyzing complexity of Petri net problems and on designing efficient and/or heuristic algorithms. The minimum initial marking problem of timed Petri nets (
TPMIM) is defined as follows: “Given a timed Petri net, a firing count vector
X and a nonnegative integer
π, find a minimum initial marking (an initial marking with the minimum total token number) among those initial ones
M each of which satisfies that there is a firing scheduling which is legal on
M with respect to
X and whose completion time is no more than
π, and, if any, find such a firing scheduling.” In a production system like factory automation, economical distribution of initial resources, from which a schedule of job-processings is executable, can be formulated as
TPMIM. The subject of the paper is to propose two pseudo-polynomial time algorithms
TPM and
TMDLO for
TPMIM, and to evaluate them by means of computer experiment. Each of the two algorithms finds an initial marking and a firing sequence by means of algorithms for
MIM (the initial marking problem for non-timed Petri nets), and then converts it to a firing scheduling of a given timed Petri net. It is shown through our computer experiments that TPM has highest capability among our implemented algorithms including
TPM and
TMDLO.
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