Synthesis of Run-To-Completion Controllers for Discrete Event Systems

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new run-to-completion control framework for discrete event systems that balances the controller's ability to perform multiple actions without interruption, addressing limitations of traditional race-based models.

Contribution

It formalizes the RTC control problem for DES with LTL specifications and reduces it to a standard control problem, offering a more realistic modeling approach.

Findings

RTC naturally supports sequences of actions initiated by both controller and environment.

The RTC control problem can be reduced to a standard control problem.

Provides a formal framework for more realistic DES control modeling.

Abstract

A controller for a Discrete Event System must achieve its goals despite that its environment being capable of resolving race conditions between controlled and uncontrolled events.Assuming that the controller loses all races is sometimes unrealistic. In many cases, a realistic assumption is that the controller sometimes wins races and is fast enough to perform multiple actions without being interrupted. However, in order to model this scenario using control of DES requires introducing foreign assumptions about scheduling, that are hard to figure out correctly. We propose a more balanced control problem, named run-to-completion (RTC), to alleviate this issue. RTC naturally supports an execution assumption in which both the controller and the environment are guaranteed to initiate and perform sequences of actions, without flooding or delaying each other indefinitely. We consider control of DES in the context where specifications are given in the form of linear temporal logic. We formalize the RTC control problem and show how it can be reduced to a standard control problem.