Designing communicating transaction processes by supervisory control theory

A Communicating Transaction Process (CTP) is a computational model that serves as a high level specification language for reactive embedded system components and their interactions. It consists of a network of communicating processes coordinating their behaviors via common actions and the common actions are refined as a set of guarded Message Sequence Charts (MSCs). There has been little work devoted to developing CTP models systematically. This paper takes the first step towards bridging this gap. In our work, communicating processes of embedded components are modeled and controlled as Discrete-Event Systems (DES). The control logic among communicating components is derived by Supervisory Control Theory (SCT), so as to guarantee that the communicating processes meet all predefined constraints and possess other desirable system behavioral properties. The control logic is then translated into propositional formulas for guarded MSCs which then results in a CTP model with guaranteed behavioral properties.