In: Proceedings of the 31st Midwest Symposium on Circuits and Systems. IEEE Computer Society Press, 1988.
Abstract: Fairness is an important property of resource-sharing concurrent systems. This paper investigates some relationships among various concepts of fairness, such as bounded fairness (B-fairness), unconditional fairness, strong fairness and weak fairness in the context of Petri nets. We identify some subclasses of Petri Nets for which different fairness concepts become equivalent. In particular, it is shown that: (1) B-fair and unconditionally-fair nets are equivalent concepts for bounded Petri nets; (2) B-fair, unconditionally-fair, and strongly-fair nets are equivalent concepts for bounded live simple nets; and (3) B-fair, unconditionally-fair, strongly-fair, and weakly-fair nets are equivalent concepts for bounded live marked graphs. In addition, the above concepts of fairness are generalized to subsets and coverings of transitions.