I/O Systems

This plug-in addresses discrete event systems that satisfy a variation of Willems' conditions on I/O behaviours [B1]. In the context of system interconnection, the conditions imply a structural non-blocking property. In particular, one may design a controller for a plant abstraction and run it on the actual plant, without risking a blocking situation. This enables the use of discrete event systems synthesis methods to solve control problems for plants with an infinite state space, provided that a finite abstraction is available; see e.g. [B2] for a discussion of hybrid control systems from this perspective.

A detailed treatment of I/O systems from a discrete event perspective is given in Thomas Wittmann's Diploma Thesis, including how they relate to abstraction based controller design. A consise summary has been presented in [B3]. The remainder of the user reference is organized as follows:


Copyright (C) 2010, Thomas Wittmann, Thomas Moor.

A Simple Example

Consider a vehicle on a path that can be controlled by input events e to "move to the east" and w to "move to the west", respectively. A measurement facility distinguishes a home position and issues output events H for "home", E for "east of home" and W for "west of home". The dynamics of the vehicle are modelled by the below transition system, where we use an infinite state space to represent an unbounded path.

Plant L
bild

We interpret the transition system w.r.t. the infinite time axis, i.e., as an omega-language  Sigma^w. Since state enumeration is not feasible for an infinite state set, we can not directly apply enumaration based methods from supervisory control theory. Thus, we resort to a plant abstraction with a finite state set. The abstraction L'  Sigma^w, L  L', realized by the transition system below, has been obtained by merging all states east of position E1 and all states west of position W1.

Abstraction L'
bild

As a specification, we require the vehicle to regularly visit east and west positions. For sake of simplicity, we circumvent eventuality properties and use the more restrictive language inclusion specification E depicted below. We apply the synthesis procedure IoSynthesis on the plant abstraction to obtain a controller such that K' := L' E. The procedure is essentially a wrapper for SupConComplete, i.e. output events are not disabled and any finite string can be further extended.

Specification E Supervisor H
bild       hhh

Clearly, the controller will also enforce the specification when applied to the actual plant L:

K :=  LH    L'H    E

In general, the closed loop interconnection with the actual plant may be blocking. However, for our plant at hand this is not the case. Observe that, for our plant, input events from U = {e, w} and output events from Y = {H, E, W} alternate, and that the plant in every state will accept either none or any input event. The latter property is referred to as a locally free input:

( s  Prefix(L)  \mu, \mu'  U) [ s\mu  Prefix(L)        s\mu'  Prefix(L) ] ,

see also IsInputLocallyFree. Indeed, together with controllability of Prefix(H) w.r.t. to the plant abstraction Prefix(L'), the locally free input of the actual plant L forms a sufficient condition for a locally nonblocking closed loop, i.e.

Prefix(L)Prefix(H) is complete.

For our example, the plant also fulfills the stronger condition of a omega-free input, which implies an omega-nonblocking closed loop, i.e.

Prefix(L)Prefix(H) = Prefix(LH),

see also IsInputOmegaFree. A variation of this example that includes eventuality properties expressed via Buchi's acceptance condition is presented at IoSynthesisNB.

Literature

[B1] J.C. Willems: Paradigms and Puzzles in the theory of dynamical systems, IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, vol. 36, issue 3, pp. 258--294, 1991.

[B2] T. Moor, J. Raisch: Supvervisory control of hybrid systems within a behavioural framework, Special issue on hybrid systems, System and Control Letters, vol. 38:3, pp. 157-166, 1999.

[B3] T. Moor, K. Schmidt, Th. Wittmann: Abstraction-based control for not necessarily closed behaviours, Preprints of the 18th IFAC World Congress, pp. 6988-6993, 2011.

libFAUDES 2.32b --- 2024.03.08 --- with "synthesis-observer-diagnosis-iosystem-hiosys-multitasking-coordinationcontrol-timed-iodevice-simulator-luabindings"