An Automata Theoretic Approach to Modular Diagnosis of Discrete-Event Systems

In todays complex technology even specialists find it increasingly difficult to comprehend the technical details of processes in order to find and to remove occurring faults. Therefore, it is necessary to apply methods that automatically find these faults and warn the user timely to avoid harm to man, environment, and machine. This book provides several novel model-based approaches to diagnosis and discusses their applications. The main focus lays on showing how the needed computational resources can be greatly reduced by using a modular component-based modelling approach. This book is divided into four parts. Part 1 gives an extensive introduction into diagnosis and automata theory. Part 2 introduces several diagnostic approaches using nondeterministic automata networks resulting in a distinct computational advantage compared to classical approaches. Part 3 transfers these results to stochastic automata networks. Part 4 addresses advanced topics such as network simulation and discrete-event modelling of physical systems. All results are illustrated by extensive examples and code fragments.