A Uniform Framework for Diagnosis of Discrete-Event Systems with Unreliable Sensors using Linear Temporal Logic

TL;DR

This paper introduces a comprehensive framework using linear temporal logic to verify diagnosability in discrete-event systems with various unreliable sensors, unifying and extending existing approaches.

Contribution

A novel uniform framework based on LTL for diagnosing discrete-event systems with general unreliable sensors, encompassing and surpassing previous specific sensor failure models.

Findings

Proposed a new notion of φ-diagnosability with necessary and sufficient conditions.

Framework supports arbitrary user-defined unreliable sensor types.

Demonstrated the framework with two new diagnosability notions.

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the diagnosability verification problem of partially-observed discrete-event systems (DES) subject to unreliable sensors. In this setting, upon the occurrence of each event, the sensor reading may be non-deterministic due to measurement noises or possible sensor failures. Existing works on this topic mainly consider specific types of unreliable sensors such as the cases of intermittent sensors failures, permanent sensor failures or their combinations. In this work, we propose a novel \emph{uniform framework} for diagnosability of DES subject to, not only sensor failures, but also a very general class of unreliable sensors. Our approach is to use linear temporal logic (LTL) with semantics on infinite traces to describe the possible behaviors of the sensors. A new notion of $\varphi$-diagnosability is proposed as the necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of a diagnoser when the behaviors of sensors satisfy the LTL formula $\varphi$. Effective approach is provided to verify this notion. We show that, our new notion of $\varphi$-diagnosability subsumes all existing notions of robust diagnosability of DES subject to sensor failures. Furthermore, the proposed framework is user-friendly and flexible since it supports an arbitrary user-defined unreliable sensor type based on the specific scenario of the application. As examples, we provide two new notions of diagnosability, which have never been investigated in the literature, using our uniform framework.