This paper presents a novel arc of Petri nets, namely data inhibitor arcs, and its application to deadlock control of discrete event systems. A data inhibitor arc is from a place to a transition labeled with a set of data. The transition is disabled by the place if the number of tokens in the place is in the set of data labeled on the arc. By using the data inhibitor arcs, a maximally permissive Petri net supervisor is designed to prevent a discrete event system from reaching illegal markings. Furthermore, a technique is proposed to ?nd only one control place to make the system live with all legal markings. Finally, we provide examples to demonstrate the proposed approach.