Synthesis of Run-To-Completion Controllers for Discrete Event Systems

Abstract: A controller for a Discrete Event System must achieve its goals despite that its environment being capable of resolving race conditions between controlled and uncontrolled events.Assuming that the controller loses all races is sometimes unrealistic. In many cases, a realistic assumption is that the controller sometimes wins races and is fast enough to perform multiple actions without being interrupted. However, in order to model this scenario using control of DES requires introducing foreign assumptions about scheduling, that are hard to figure out correctly. We propose a more balanced control problem, named run-to-completion (RTC), to alleviate this issue. RTC naturally supports an execution assumption in which both the controller and the environment are guaranteed to initiate and perform sequences of actions, without flooding or delaying each other indefinitely. We consider control of DES in the context where specifications are given in the form of linear temporal logic. We formalize the RTC control problem and show how it can be reduced to a standard control problem.