Continuous Petri Nets for Fast Yield Computation: Polynomial-Time and MILP Approaches

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Jordon, Addie, Kolčák, Juri, Merkle, Daniel
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Jordon, Addie
Kolčák, Juri
Merkle, Daniel
author_facet Jordon, Addie
Kolčák, Juri
Merkle, Daniel
contents Petri nets provide accurate analogues to chemical reaction networks, with places representing individual molecules (the resources of the system) and transitions representing chemical reactions which convert educt molecules into product molecules. Their natural affinity for modeling chemical reaction networks is, however, impeded by their computational complexity, which is at least PSpace-hard for most interesting questions, including reachability. Continuous Petri nets offer the same structure and discrete time as discrete Petri nets, but use continuous state-space, which allows them to answer the reachability question in polynomial time. We exploit this property to introduce a polynomial time algorithm for computing the maximal yield of a molecule in a chemical system. Additionally, we provide an alternative algorithm based on mixed-integer linear programming with worse theoretical complexity, but better runtime in practice, as demonstrated on both synthetic and chemical data.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_02371
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Continuous Petri Nets for Fast Yield Computation: Polynomial-Time and MILP Approaches
Jordon, Addie
Kolčák, Juri
Merkle, Daniel
Discrete Mathematics
Data Structures and Algorithms
Petri nets provide accurate analogues to chemical reaction networks, with places representing individual molecules (the resources of the system) and transitions representing chemical reactions which convert educt molecules into product molecules. Their natural affinity for modeling chemical reaction networks is, however, impeded by their computational complexity, which is at least PSpace-hard for most interesting questions, including reachability. Continuous Petri nets offer the same structure and discrete time as discrete Petri nets, but use continuous state-space, which allows them to answer the reachability question in polynomial time. We exploit this property to introduce a polynomial time algorithm for computing the maximal yield of a molecule in a chemical system. Additionally, we provide an alternative algorithm based on mixed-integer linear programming with worse theoretical complexity, but better runtime in practice, as demonstrated on both synthetic and chemical data.
title Continuous Petri Nets for Fast Yield Computation: Polynomial-Time and MILP Approaches
topic Discrete Mathematics
Data Structures and Algorithms
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.02371