Characterizations of self-stabilizing ordinary and general Petri nets are provided. The authors prove that the self-stabilization problem is PTIME-complete for bounded ordinary Petri nets and PSPACE-complete for bounded general Petri nets.

The paper is well written, well structured, and easy to read. Section 1 introduces the self-stabilization problem. Section 2 provides background material on Petri net definitions and notation used in the paper. Section 3 details self-stabilizing Petri nets and discusses their fundamental properties. Section 4 presents a structural characterization of self-stabilizing bounded ordinary Petri nets, and section 5 presents a similar characterization for self-stabilizing bounded general Petri nets. Section 6 summarizes the paper and briefly discusses possible directions for further work.

The paper is nicely focused on a well-defined and contained problem. The material is appropriately partitioned into background information, specific problem statement, and contributions and results. The preliminary material on Petri nets is particularly well done. Although research in this area is well established, some of the references are rather dated (although still valid).

The two sections that present new results on the time and space complexity for bounded ordinary and general Petri nets are denser. Nevertheless, the proofs are reasonably easy to follow, even for the nonexpert. The inherent problems of using Petri nets to model self-stabilizing systems are correctly raised in the final section of the paper. Some of the open research areas discussed, such as the refinement of the complexity results presented in the paper, could prove fruitful for interested students.