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Synthesis and Viability of Minimally Interventive Legal Controllers for Hybrid Systems

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Abstract

In this paper, we study the control of Composite Hybrid Machines (CHMs) subject to safety specifications. CHMs are a fairly general class of hybrid systems modeled in modular fashion as the concurrent operation of Elementary Hybrid Machines (EHMs). The formalism has a well-defined synchronous-composition operation that permits the introduction of the controller as a component of the system. The task of a legal (safety) controller is to ensure that the system never exits a set of specified legal configurations. Among the legal controllers, we are particularly interested in designing a minimally-interventive (or minimally-restrictive) one, which interferes in the system's operation only when constraint violation is otherwise inevitable. Thus, a minimally interventive safety controller provides maximum flexibility in embedding additional controllers designed for other control objectives to operate concurrently, while eliminating the need to re-investigate or re-verify the legality of the composite controller with respect to the safety specification. We describe in detail an algorithm for controller synthesis and examine the viability of a synthesized controller as related to the possibility of Zenoness, where the system can undergo an unbounded number of transitions in a bounded length of time.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Technion, Israel

    Michael Heymann

  2. Institute of Technology, Haifa, 32000, Israel

    Michael Heymann

  3. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI, 48202

    Feng Lin

  4. NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, CA, 94035

    George Meyer

Authors
  1. Michael Heymann
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  2. Feng Lin
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  3. George Meyer
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Heymann, M., Lin, F. & Meyer, G. Synthesis and Viability of Minimally Interventive Legal Controllers for Hybrid Systems. Discrete Event Dynamic Systems 8, 105–135 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1008285600895

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