Developing control and integration software for flexible manufacturing systems

The slow growth of computer-integrated manufacturing is attributed to the complexity of designing and implementing their control and integration software. This article expands on a methodology for designing and implementing this software that was introduced in [16]. The goal of this methodology is to build flexible and resuable control and integration software for computer-integrated manufacturing systems. It hinges upon the concepts of software/hardware components, their assemblages, a distributed common language environment, formal models, and generic controllers. Major sources of flexibility are obtained by decoupling process plan models from the model of the factory floor and by using a generic controller. Reusability is achieved by building selfcontained software/hardware components with general, possibly parametrized, interfaces. The interplay between simulated and actual hardware internals of software/hardware components is used as the basis of a testing strategy that performs off-line simulation followed by on-line testing.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/43095/1/10952_2005_Article_BF02265064.pd

Centralized and distributed algorithms for on-line synthesis of maximal control policies under partial observation

This paper deals with the on-line control of partially observed discrete event systems (DES). The goal is to restrict the behavior of the system within a prefix-closed legal language while accounting for the presence of uncontrollable and unobservable events. In the spirit of recent work on the on-line control of partially observed DES (Heymann and Lin 1994) and on variable lookahead control of fully observed DES (Ben Hadj-Alouane et al. 1994c), we propose an approach where, following each observable event, a control action is computed on-line using an algorithm of linear worst-case complexity. This algorithm, called VLP-PO , has the following additional properties: (i) the resulting behavior is guaranteed to be a maximal controllable and observable sublanguage of the legal language; (ii) different maximals may be generated by varying the priorities assigned to the controllable events, a parameter of VLP-PO ; (iii) a maximal containing the supremal controllable and normal sublanguage of the legal language can be generated by a proper selection of controllable event priorities; and (iv) no off-line calculations are necessary. We also present a parallel/distributed version of the VLP-PO algorithm called DI-VLP-PO . This version uses several communicating agents that simultaneously run (on-line) identical versions of the algorithm but on possibly different parts of the system model and the legal language, according to the structural properties of the system and the specifications. While achieving the same behavior as VLO-PO, DI-VLP-PO runs at a total complexity (for computation and communication) that is significantly lower than its sequential counterpart.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/45126/1/10626_2005_Article_BF01797138.pd

PSPACE-completeness of Modular Supervisory Control Problems*

In this paper we investigate computational issues associated with the supervision of concurrent processes modeled as modular discrete-event systems. Here, modular discrete-event systems are sets of deterministic finite-state automata whose interaction is modeled by the parallel composition operation. Even with such a simple model process model, we show that in general many problems related to the supervision of these systems are PSPACE-complete. This shows that although there may be space-efficient methods for avoiding the state-explosion problem inherent to concurrent processes, there are most likely no time-efficient solutions that would aid in the study of such “large-scale” systems. We show our results using a reduction from a special class of automata intersection problem introduced here where behavior is assumed to be prefix-closed. We find that deciding if there exists a supervisor for a modular system to achieve a global specification is PSPACE-complete. We also show many verification problems for system supervision are PSPACE-complete, even for prefix-closed cases. Supervisor admissibility and online supervision operations are also discussed.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/45090/1/10626_2004_Article_6210.pd

Design and analysis of variable fidelity experimentation applied to engine valve heat treatment process design

When experimentation on a real system is expensive, data are often collected by using cheaper, lower fidelity surrogate systems. The paper concerns response surface methods in the context of variable fidelity experimentation. We propose the use of generalized least squares to generate the predictions. We also present perhaps the first optimal designs for variable fidelity experimentation, using an extension of the expected integrated mean-squared error criterion. Numerical tests are used to compare the performance of the method with alternatives and to investigate the robustness to incorporated assumptions. The method is applied to automotive engine valve heat treatment process design in which real world data were mixed with data from two types of computer simulation. Copyright 2005 Royal Statistical Society.

Dynamic Observers for the Synthesis of Opaque Systems

In this paper, we address the problem of synthesizing opaque systems. A secret predicate S over the runs of a system G is opaque to an external user having partial observability over G, if s/he can never infer from the observation of a run of G that the run belongs to S. We first investigate the case of static partial observability where the set of events the user can observe is fixed a priori. In this context, we show that checking whether a system is opaque is PSPACE-complete, which implies that computing an optimal static observer ensuring opacity is also a PSPACE-complete problem. Next, we introduce dynamic partial observability where the set of events the user can observe changes over time. We show how to check that a system is opaque w.r.t. to a dynamic observer and also address the corresponding synthesis problem: given a system G and secret states S, compute the set of dynamic observers under which S is opaque. Our main result is that the set of such observers can be finitely represented and can be computed in EXPTIME