Diagnosability of stochastic discrete-event systems

We investigate diagnosability of stochastic discrete-event systems. We define the notions of A- and AA-diagnosability for stochastic automata; these notions are weaker than the corresponding notion of diagnosability for logical automata introduced by Sampath et al. Through the construction of a stochastic diagnoser, we determine offline conditions necessary and sufficient to guarantee A-diagnosability and sufficient to guarantee AA-diagnosability. We also show how the stochastic diagnoser can be used for on-line diagnosis of failure events. We illustrate the results through two examples from HVAC systems.     

Diagnosability analysis of hybrid systems cast in a discrete-event framework

This paper addresses the problem of assessing the diagnosability of hybrid systems modeled by a hybrid automaton coupling methods from the continuous and the discrete event model-based diagnosis fields. The discrete states of the hybrid automaton represent the modes of operation of the system for which the continuous dynamics are specified. The diagnosability of the continuously-valued part of the model is first analyzed and the new concept of mode signature is shown to characterize mode diagnosability from continuous measurements. Continuous dynamics are then abstracted by defining a set of signature-events associated to mode signature changes, preserving this way mode diagnosability. The behavior of the abstract hybrid system is then modeled by a prefix-closed language over the original event alphabet enriched by these additional events. Based on this language, diagnosability analysis of the hybrid system is cast into a discrete-event framework and hybrid diagnosability conditions are provided. A case study based on the Attitude and Orbit Control System of a spacecraft illustrates the method.     

Diagnosability of fair discrete event systems

Failure diagnosability has been widely studied using discrete event system (DES) models. It is, however, shown in this work by means of a counterexample that the diagnosability condition, which has been shown to be necessary and sufficient in the DES context, fails to hold for many real‐world hybrid systems. This is because the abstraction employed in formulating the DES models obliterates the continuous dynamics. In the present work, a new failure diagnosability mechanism has been developed for discrete time hybrid system (DTHS) models to alleviate this problem. A new diagnosability condition is proposed and its necessity and sufficiency with respect to the diagnosability definition are established formally. Finally, the method of A‐diagnosability, which can also be used to circumvent this problem and which needs additional probabilistic information for diagnosability analysis, has been shown to have a higher computational complexity than the DTHS model based method proposed in this paper. Further, it is also highlighted that the DTHS model based diagnosability analysis technique is capable of diagnosing faults that degrade the temporal performance of the system, which cannot be handled by the A‐diagnosability analysis mechanism. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley and Sons Asia Pte Ltd and Chinese Automatic Control Society     

Diagnosability of fuzzy discrete event systems

In this paper, discrete event systems (DESs) are reformulated as fuzzy discrete event systems (FDESs) and fuzzy discrete event dynamical systems (FDEDSs). These frameworks include fuzzy states, events and IF-THEN rules. In these frameworks, all events occur at the same time with different membership degrees. Fuzzy states and events have been introduced to describe uncertainties that occur often in practical problems, such as fault diagnosis applications. To measure a diagnoser’s fault discrimination ability, a fuzzy diagnosability degree is proposed. If the diagnosability of the degree of the system yields one a diagnoser can be implemented to identify all possible fault types related to a system. For any degree less than one, researchers should not devote their time to distinguish all possible fault types correctly. Thus, two different diagnosability definitions FDEDS and FDES are introduced. Due to the specialized fuzzy rule-base embedded in the FDEDS, it is capable of representing a class of non-linear dynamic system. Computationally speaking, the framework of diagnosability of the FDEDS is structurally similar to the framework of diagnosability of a non-linear system. The crisp DES diagnosability has been turned into the term fuzzy diagnosability for the FDES. The newly proposed diagnosability definition allows us to define a degree of diagnosability in a class of non-linear systems. In addition, a simple fuzzy diagnosability checking method is introduced and some numerical examples are provided to illustrate this theoretical development. Finally, the potential applications of the proposed method are discussed.     

Hierarchical control of discrete-event systems

An abstract hierarchical control theory is developed for discrete-event systems, based on the concepts of control structures and observers. Control structure is an abstract generalization of the family of controllable sublanguages in the Ramadge-Wonham framework. We establish a general version of Zhong's hierarchical consistency by first achieving control consistency — preservation of control structures through the aggregation mapping in a two-level hierarchy. For a refinement of hierarchical consistency with preservation of nonblocking, the concept of observer is introduced via congruences on nondeterministic transition structures.     

Active diagnosis of discrete-event systems

The need for accurate and timely diagnosis of system failures and the advantages of automated diagnostic systems are well appreciated. However, diagnosability considerations are often not explicitly taken into account in the system design. In particular, design of the controller and that of the diagnostic subsystem are decoupled, and this may significantly affect the diagnosability properties of a system. The authors present an integrated approach to control and diagnosis. More specifically, they present an approach for the design of diagnosable systems by appropriate design of the system controller. This problem, which they refer to as the active diagnosis problem, is studied in the framework of discrete-event systems (DESs); it is based on prior and new results on the theory of diagnosis for DESs and on existing results in supervisory control under partial observations. They formulate the active diagnosis problem as a supervisory control problem where the legal language is an “appropriate” regular sublanguage of the regular language generated by the system. They present an iterative procedure for determining the supremal controllable, observable, and diagnosable sublanguage of the legal language and for obtaining the supervisor that synthesizes this language. This procedure provides both a controller that ensures diagnosability of the closed-loop system and a diagnoser for online failure diagnosis. The procedure can be implemented using finite-state machines and is guaranteed to converge in a finite number of iterations. The authors illustrate their approach using a simple pump-valve system     

赋时离散事件系统的安全诊断

针对一类计时或非计时自动机模型,研究其赋时离散事件系统(TDES)故障诊断的安全性问题.首先对TDES的安全可诊断性进行形式化;然后通过构造一个非法语言识别器对被禁止危险操作序列进行识别,在此基础上构建一个安全诊断器,提出一种基于安全诊断器的安全诊断方法,并得到一个关于TDES安全可诊断性的充分必要条件,从而实现TDES的安全故障诊断.     

Robustness of supervisors for discrete-event systems

Supervisory control in the context of ω-languages is considered. The nominal supervisor design problem is to find a non-blocking supervisor for a nominal plant such that the closed-loop infinite behavior equals a specified closed-loop behavior. The robustness of solutions to the nominal problem is defined with respect to variations in the plant. It is shown there exists a supervisor solving the nominal problem which maximizes the set of plants for which the closed-loop languages for all other plants in the set satisfy lower and upper bounds in the sense of language containment. Computational issues are discussed and the theoretical results are illustrated with an example     

不完备离散事件系统的当前状态不透明性

本文针对不完备系统模型,研究不完备离散事件系统的当前状态不透明性.根据系统的实际输出与预测输出之间的差异,构建了一个具有学习功能的学习诊断器.这种学习诊断器不仅能够模拟系统的状态转移,而且还可以将系统缺失的状态信息通过学习得到恢复.通过引入集合覆盖理论处理由学习诊断器得出的结果,提出了一种基于学习诊断器的不完备离散事件系统当前状态不透明性的验证算法.     

离散事件系统基于模式的安全故障诊断

基于模式的故障诊断方法能将触发系统故障的事件串诊断出来,但在诊断期间系统仍然可能执行被禁止的不安全操作.为此,提出了一种离散事件系统基于S型和T型模式的安全诊断方法.先对离散事件系统基于模式的安全可诊断性进行形式化,再通过构造非法语言识别器和安全诊断器对系统发生的故障模式实施安全诊断,最后分别得到了一个关于S型和T型模式的系统安全可诊断性的充分必要条件,实现了离散事件系统基于模式的安全故障诊断.     

Modular supervisory control of discrete-event systems

A modular approach to the supervisory control of a class of discrete-event systems is formulated, and illustrated with an example. Discrete-event systems are modeled by automata together with a mechanism for enabling and disabling a subset of state transitions. The basic problem of interest is to ensure by appropriate supervision that the closed loop behavior of the system lies within a given legal behavior. Assuming this behavior can be decomposed into an intersection of component restrictions, we determine conditions under which it is possible to synthesize the appropriate control in a modular fashion. The work of this author was supported by NSERC (Canada) under Grant No. A-7399. The work of this author was supported by the National Science Foundation through Grant No. ECS-8504584.     

Sample-path analysis of stochastic discrete-event systems

This paper presents a unified sample-path approach for deriving distribution-free relations between performance measures for stochastic discrete-event systems extending previous results for discrete-state processes to processes with a general state space. A unique feature of our approach is that all our results are shown to follow from a single fundamental theorem: the sample-path version of the renewal-reward theorem (Y=X). As an elementary consequence of this theorem, we derive a version of the rate-conservation law under conditions more general than previously given in the literature. We then focus on relations between continuous-time state frequencies and frequencies at the points of an imbedded point process, giving necessary and sufficient conditions for theASTA (Arrivals See Time Averages), conditionalASTA, and reversedASTA properties. In addition, we provide a unified approach for proving various relations involving forward and backward recurrence times. Finally, we give sufficient conditions for rate stability of an input-output system and apply these results to obtain an elementary proof of the relation between the workload and attained-waiting-time processes in aG/G/l queue.Research was partially supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant no. DDM-8719825. The government of the United States of America has certain rights in this material. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. The research of this author was also partially supported by a grant from Centre International des Étudiants et Stagiares (C.I.E.S.) while he was visiting INRIA, Sophia-Antipolis, Valbonne, France (1991–92).     

Supervisory control of timed discrete-event systems

The Ramadge-Wonham framework for control of discrete event systems is augmented with timing features by use of Ostroff's semantics for timed transition models. It is shown that the RW concept of controllability and the existence of maximally permissive supervisory controls can be suitably generalized. The enhanced setting admits subsystem composition and the concept of forcible event as an event that preempts the tick of a global clock. An example of a simple manufacturing cell illustrates how the new framework can be used to solve synthesis problems which may include logic-based, temporal and quantitative optimality specifications     

Similarity-based supervisory control of discrete-event systems

Due to the appearance of uncontrollable events in discrete-event systems, one may wish to replace the behavior leading to the uncontrollability of pre-specified language by some quite similar one. To capture this similarity, we introduce metric to traditional supervisory control theory and generalize the concept of original controllability to /spl lambda/-controllability, where /spl lambda/ indicates the similarity degree of two languages. A necessary and sufficient condition for a language to be /spl lambda/-controllable is provided. We then examine some properties of /spl lambda/-controllable languages and present an approach to optimizing a realization.     

Output stabilizability of discrete-event dynamic systems

The authors investigate the problem of designing stabilizing feedback compensators for discrete-event dynamic systems (DEDS) modeled as finite-state automata in which some transition events are controllable and some events are observed. The problem of output stabilization is defined as the construction of a compensator such that all state trajectories in the closed-loop system go through a given set E infinitely often. The authors also define a stronger notion of output stabilizability which requires that the state not only pass through E infinitely often but that the set of instants when the state is in E and one knows it is in E is also infinite. Necessary and sufficient conditions are presented for both notions. The authors also introduce and characterize a notion of resiliency that corresponds to the system being able to recover from observation errors. In addition, they provide some general bounds for the algorithms considered and discuss several conditions under which far smaller bounds can be achieved     

Supervisory control of concurrent discrete-event systems

When a discrele-event system P consists of several subsystems P₁,...,P_n which operate concurrently, a natural approach to the supervisory control problem is to synthesize a ‘local’ controller S_i , for each subsystem P_i , and operate the individually controlled subsystems S_i/P_i concurrently. Such an approach is called concurrent supervisory control and is closely related to decentralized supervisory control as studied by Cieslak et al. (1988) and Lin and Wonham (1988). In the present paper simple and easily computable conditions are developed which guarantee that concurrent supervisory control can achieve the optimal behaviour achievable by a global supervisor. To achieve this, two specific concurrent control strategies are introduced.     

Supervision localization of timed discrete-event systems

We study supervisor localization for real-time discrete-event systems (DES) in the Brandin–Wonham framework of timed supervisory control. We view a real-time DES as comprised of asynchronous agents which are coupled through imposed logical and temporal specifications; the essence of supervisor localization is the decomposition of monolithic (global) control action into local control strategies for these individual agents. This study extends our previous work on supervisor localization for untimed DES, in that monolithic timed control action typically includes not only disabling action as in the untimed case, but also “clock preempting” action which enforces prescribed temporal behavior. The latter action is executed by a class of special events, called “forcible” events; accordingly, we localize monolithic preemptive action with respect to these events. We demonstrate the new features of timed supervisor localization with a manufacturing cell case study and discuss a distributed control implementation.     

Hierarchical control of timed discrete-event systems

An abstract hierarchical control theory is developed for a class of timed discrete-event systems (TDES) within the discrete-event control architectural framework proposed earlier by the authors. For this development, a control theory for TDES is introduced in the spirit of a prior theory of Brandin. A notion of time control structures is introduced, and on its basis a general property of hierarchical consistency is achieved by establishing control consistency — namely preservation of time control structures through the aggregation mapping in a two-level hierarchy.     

Pade approximation for stochastic discrete-event systems

We show that Pade approximation can be effectively used for approximation of performance functions in discrete-event systems. The method is (1) obtaining the MacLaurin coefficients of the performance function and (2) finding a Pade approximant from the MacLaurin coefficients and use it to approximate the function. We use the method with the expected number of renewals in a random interval, GI/G/1 systems, and inventory systems. The results are very good