Control and Diagnosis of Discrete Event Systems: Some Recent Trends

We will present an overview of recent research trends in control and diagnosis of Discrete Event Systems (DES) that are motivated by challenges arising in cyber-physical systems.

In the first part of the talk, we will review the basic theory of supervisory control of DES, discuss its connection with reactive synthesis in computer science, and present results on its application to the problem of collision avoidance in vehicular networks. In this application, the continuous dynamics of the vehicles are abstracted in a discrete-event model, where uncontrollable events capture unmodeled dynamics and unobservable events capture measurement uncertainty.

In the second part of the talk, we will review the basic theory of fault diagnosis in partially-observed DES and then discuss recent work on enforcement of opacity, a class of properties studied in computer security. Opacity is essentially the dual of diagnosability. Finally, we will present some thoughts on problems of intrusion detection in control systems that are subject to attack by malicious intruders.