Detectability of Discrete Event Systems with Dynamic Event Observation

Syst Control Lett. 2010 Jan 1;59(1):9-17. doi: 10.1016/j.sysconle.2009.11.001.

Abstract

Our previous work considers detectability of discrete event systems which is to determine the current state and subsequent states of a system based on event observation. We assume that event observation is static, that is, if an event is observable, then all its occurrences are observable. However, in practical systems such as sensor networks, event observation often needs to be dynamic, that is, the occurrences of same events may or may not be observable, depending on the state of the system. In this paper, we generalize static event observation into dynamic event observation and consider the detectability problem under dynamic event observation. We define four types of detectabilities. To check detectabilities, we construct the observer with exponential complexity. To reduce computational complexity, we can also construct a detector with polynomial complexity to check strong detectabilities. Dynamic event observation can be implemented in two possible ways: a passive observation and an active observation. For the active observation, we discuss how to find minimal event observation policies that preserve four types of detectabilities respectively.