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Progressive events in supervisory control and compositional verification

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Abstract

This paper investigates some limitations of the nonblocking property when used for supervisor synthesis in discrete event systems. It is shown that there are cases where synthesis with the nonblocking property gives undesired results. To address such cases, the paper introduces progressive events as a means to specify more precisely how a synthesised supervisor should complete its tasks. The nonblocking property is modified to take progressive events into account, and appropriate methods for verification and synthesis are proposed. Experiments show that progressive events can be used in the analysis of industrial-scale systems, and can expose issues that remain undetected by standard nonblocking verification.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore

    Simon Ware

  2. Department of Computer Science, University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand

    Robi Malik

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  1. Simon Ware
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  2. Robi Malik
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Correspondence to Robi Malik.

Additional information

Simon WARE received his Bachelor of Computing and Mathematical Sciences degree with Honours from the University of Waikato in Hamilton, New Zealand in 2007. Also in 2007, he was involved in a project for discrete event simulation of port biosecurity procedures at AgResearch in Hamilton. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Waikato in 2014. He is currently a research fellow at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. His main research interests are liveness and fairness properties of discrete event systems.

Robi MALIK received the M.S. and Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of Kaiserslautern, Germany, in 1993 and 1997, respectively. From 1998 to 2002, he worked in a research and development group at Siemens Corporate Research in Munich, Germany, where he was involved in the development and application of modelling and analysis software for discrete event systems. Since 2003, he is lecturing at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Waikato in Hamilton, New Zealand. He is participating in the development of the Supremica software for modelling and analysis of discrete event systems. His current research interests are in the area of model checking and synthesis of large discrete event systems and other finite-state machine models.

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Ware, S., Malik, R. Progressive events in supervisory control and compositional verification. Control Theory Technol. 12, 317–329 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11768-014-4097-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11768-014-4097-8

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