Prioritized Composition With Exclusion and Generation for the Interaction and Control of Discrete Event Systems

Interaction of multiple discrete event systems (DESs) represented as automata are carried out using composition operations. These operations on automata enforce concurrency, wherein an event exists in the composed automaton if it exists in the participating states of the interacting automata possessing the event in their event set. Heymann generalized this by introducing event priorities, wherein an event exists in the composed automaton if it exists in the participating state of the interacting automata having priority over the event. For two interacting automata P and Q, while prioritized composition can model the P, Q, AND, and OR boolean interactions, it cannot model boolean interactions which require exclusivity of participation, namely, “exclusive P”, “exclusive Q”, “exclusive P or exclusive Q”, “exclusive P and exclusive Q”. In order to also model these additional interactions we propose a generalization of prioritized composition by introducing an exclusivity set besides the existing priority sets. The resulting composition is called prioritized composition with exclusion. We also introduce prioritized composition with exclusion and generation that allows for all sixteen boolean modes of interaction possible when two automata interact. This is done by the further introduction of a nor-generative set. This event set together with the two priority sets and an exclusivity set makes it possible to model eight additional boolean interactions which do not require either of the interacting automata to participate for the event to be enabled in the composed automaton. The applicability of these interactions to decentralized supervisory decision fusion and in composing the rules based model of systems has been illustrated.