IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON AUTOMATION SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING, VOL. 11, NO.
1, JANUARY 2014 3
Guest Editorial Special Section on Advances in Discrete-Event Systems for Automation
I N RECENT years, the tremendous growth of computer
technology has led to the proliferation of a class of highly complex dynamical systems, with the distinct attribute that in the development of the target solutions, but also in the structure and the size of the formal representations of the DES dynamics that are employed by, and result from, the their behavior is determined by the asynchronous occurrence performed computation. The DES community has tried of certain event types; because of this attribute these systems to circumvent these challenges by pursuing the following are termed Discrete Event Systems (DES). Examples of DES strategies: are encountered in many traditional application areas, such as a) The development of decomposing or approximate automated manufacturing, computer networks, transportation, solution strategies, based on the qualitative insights air traffic control, as well as in emerging areas like healthcare, and the formal properties that have been established communication and information processing, and the allocation through the complete rigorous analysis of the original and management of technical, human and financial resources. problem formulations. Of particular interest along Furthermore, in the recent past, a large number of researchers these lines, is the ongoing endeavor to develop ef- and practitioners have devoted their attention to this class of fective approximations of the DES dynamics that dynamical systems in order to address a series of difficult take place in various application domains through problems, often combinatorial in nature, that concern their abstracting representations that are based on the analysis, optimization and control. modeling framework of Hybrid Systems. The goal of this Special Section is to bring together re- b) The identification and exploitation of special struc- searchers and practitioners from, both, academia and industry ture that exists in various DES applications and to highlight the state-of-the-art of the DES-related research can lead to customized formulations and solution endeavor and its applications. The selected papers present approaches of reduced (ideally, polynomial) rep- efficient scientific and engineering solutions to a series of resentational and computational complexity. The problems related to DES, including their supervisory control, aforementioned problem of deadlock prevention and fault diagnosis, resource allocation, state estimation, and dead- avoidance in complex resource allocation systems is lock prevention and avoidance. They also provide a vision for a particular DES application domain that has bene- future research and development. Even though a considerable fited extensively from such a rich special structure. effort has been devoted to the aforementioned topics in the last c) The development of integrated computational plat- decades, many theoretical problems in this framework are still forms and pertinent interfaces that will automate the open, or their solution is only limited to small case studies, involved computation, conceal the underlying com- while the scaling of these solutions to problems of industrial putational and representational complexities from the relevance remains a challenge. end user, and present the outcome of the performed A more detailed description of the research activity that is computation in a way that is more accessible to her. currently taking place within the DES-focused research com- 2) Besides trying to connect more effectively to its traditional munity, can be epitomized as follows: application base, the DES community is currently seeking 1) As mentioned above, a major requirement for the field to expand this application base to novel application areas. is the effective transfer of its current theoretical devel- Some such application areas were already cited in the opments to the applications that motivated these devel- opening paragraph of this editorial, and they include the opments in the first place. A particular challenge along areas of healthcare, internet-based information and work- these lines is the very high complexity of the addressed flow management systems, security and systems biology. DES problems and their derived solutions. This complexity 3) Another driver for expanding, both, the current application manifests itself in the computational effort that is involved and methodological bases of DES is research that develops at the interface between DES and Hybrid Systems. As al- Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TASE.2013.2293003 ready mentioned, this research provides an effective tool
4 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON AUTOMATION SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING, VOL. 11, NO. 1, JANUARY 2014
for managing the computational complexity of many DES A control synthesis procedure is developed by applications. But it also enables the effective integration of Lennartson et al. for a generic state-vector transition model event-driven and time-driven dynamics, and, in this way, including flexible synchronous composition. In this approach, it enriches the representational and analytical capabilities supervisor guards are generated in order to guarantee a control- of the area. lable, nonblocking and maximally permissive supervisor that 4) Finally, DES-related research has been traditionally orga- can be easily implemented in industrial control systems. nized into two major areas concerning the “untimed” (or With the intent of bridging the gap between design and im- “qualitative”) and “timed” (or “quantitative”) dynamics of plementation of supervisory control systems modeled by ex- the underlying applications, with the former addressing be- tended Petri nets, Moreira and Basilio present a methodology havioral concerns for the underlying system and the latter to construct in a systematic way the ladder diagram that will be focusing primarily on aspects relating to performance. used eventually by the industrial controllers; the conversion is Besides their aforementioned difference in perspectives, such that any modification in the discrete-event controller can these two areas have also employed substantially different be easily implemented in the existing ladder diagram. methodological tools in their developments, and therefore, Finally, focusing on the DES liveness problem, Hu and Liu until recently, they have evolved fairly independently from consider a Petri net framework to synthesize liveness enforcing each other. This decoupling has also helped in the man- supervisors based on generalized mutual exclusion constraints. agement of the involved complexity. Yet, currently, both Taking into account the independent and dependent inequalities, of these DES areas have reached a maturity level that can the authors present a method to remove redundant inequalities support and benefit from a more integrative approach to in order to reduce the size of the supervisor. the overall DES analysis and control problem. Hence, the The remaining three papers in the area of DES control deal effective integration of behavioral and performance-ori- with three different application settings. The first one, by Shu ented modeling, analysis and control of the target DES and Lin, investigates fault tolerant control to ensure safety of applications is another important requirement that defines a DES. Modeling the system by an automaton, the authors the research frontier of this area. present a controller that under full or partial observation of the The papers included in this Special Section exemplify and state is able to ensure that the controlled system never visits the corroborate the aforecited trends. More specifically, in response illegal states. to the corresponding call for papers, 32 submissions were re- Fanti et al. present a hybrid model to describe and control ceived and carefully reviewed. Twelve were accepted and ap- freeway traffic dynamics. In a First-Order Hybrid Petri Net pear as papers in the Special Section. Conceptually, it is pos- Framework, the authors present a Model Predictive Control sible to divide these papers into two sets: the first eight papers strategy based on an online optimal control coordination with deal with general DES control problems, while the second set the objective of maximizing the flow density. of four papers addresses other particular DES problems such as A hybrid model is also used by Toyoshima et al. to describe diagnosability analysis, state estimation, deadlock avoidance, the switching mechanism of the states of a wheeled snake robot. and testing. Moreover, the aforementioned contributions con- Based on this hybrid model, a control strategy is presented for sider, both, industrial control problems and other more general switching the motion patterns of the robot in order to optimize applications. constraint forces and energy efficiency. Five papers in the first set are in the DES supervisory control The second part of the Special Section includes four papers area. In particular, Miremadi et al. show that augmenting the that deal with some challenging problems in the considered model of timed discrete-event systems with a finite set of dig- DES framework by capitalizing upon the special structure that ital clocks (timed extended finite automata) allows an efficient is present in the corresponding formulations. computation of the supervisor for large-scale systems. The main In particular, Cabasino et al. present a novel diagnosability feature of this approach is the symbolic computation based on analysis approach for DES modeled with labeled Petri nets. The binary decision diagrams that leads to significant efficiencies in presented procedure is inspired by automata-based approaches, the supervisor design procedure. but, thanks to the notion of basis markings, it possesses the Theunissen et al. present a specific application of the main advantage of not requiring the enumeration of the whole Ramadge and Wonham supervisory control theory to solve state space. problems arising in mechatronic systems. More precisely, the Declerck and Bonhomme focus on the problem of the online control of a patient-support table for a magnetic resonance state estimation of timed Petri nets with unobservable transi- imaging scanner is addressed. The system is modeled as a tions, following the observation of firing occurrences of a tran- finite-state automaton and the obtained controller is built in a sition subset on a sliding horizon. The significance of such an modular way that decreases the computational complexity of estimation method stems from the possibility of dealing with the synthesis. a limited amount of data, instead of using all the information available from the beginning. GUEST EDITORIALSPECIAL SECTION ON ADVANCES IN DISCRETE-EVENT SYSTEMS FOR AUTOMATION 5
Nazeem and Reveliotis consider a problem that has received CHRISTOS G. CASSANDRAS, Guest Editor extensive attention in the DES literature over the last few Boston University decades, namely, the establishment of deadlock-free resource Division of Systems Engineering and allocation. The authors present an original approach for the Center for Information and Systems Engineering deployment of the maximally permissive deadlock avoidance Boston, MA 02215 USA cgc@bu.edu policy for complex resource allocation systems, that is based on a novel algorithm for the efficient identification and storage of a critical subset of the system states; this subset collects the MARIA PIA FANTI, Lead Guest Editor states that are reached by transitions taking the system outside Polytechnic of Bari Department of Electrical and Information Engineering its safe region, and its availability enables the implementation Bari, 70126 Italy of the target policy through one-step-lookahead. fanti@deemail.poliba.it Finally, Pocci et al. investigate the problem of computing synchronizing sequences for systems modeled by synchronized Petri nets. In order to look for an efficient way to solve the CHRISTOFOROS HADJICOSTIS, Guest Editor University of Cyprus testing problems for DES, the authors provide some techniques, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering based on Petri net models, that avoid state explosion problems Nicosia, 1678 Cyprus by means of structural analysis. The presented tool is applied chadjic@ucy.ac.cy to randomly generated Petri nets and some example DES taken from the manufacturing domain. SPYROS REVELIOTIS, Guest Editor We conclude this Guest Editorial by adding that this Special Georgia Institute of Technology Section has been supported by the IEEE Robotics and Automa- School of Industrial and Systems Engineering tion Society Technical Committee on Automation in Logistics. Atlanta, GA 30332 USA Moreover, we would like to extend our gratitude to all the au- spyros.reveliotis@isye.gatech.edu thors, anonymous reviewers, Associate Editors and to the Ed- itor M. C. Zhou for their excellent efforts to ensure the best CARLA SEATZU, Guest Editor quality of the Special Section papers. We also wish to thank University of Cagliari the Editor-in-Chief K. Goldberg for the opportunity to publish Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering this Special Section, and F. Agnew and J. Barbato for their Cagliari, 09123 Italy valuable assistance. seatzu@diee.unica.it
