The language of certain conflicts of a nondeterministic process

The language of certain conflicts is the most general set of behaviours of a nondeterministic process, which certainly lead to a livelock or deadlock when accepted by another process running in parallel. It is of great use in model checking to detect livelocks or deadlocks in very large systems, and in process-algebra to obtain abstractions preserving livelock and deadlock. Unfortunately, the language of certain conflicts is difficult to compute and has only been approximated in previous work. This paper presents an effective algorithm to calculate the language of certain conflicts for any given nondeterministic finite-state process and discusses its properties. The algorithm is shown to be correct and of exponential complexity

Modular control-loop detection

This paper presents an efficient algorithm to detect control-loops in large finite-state systems. The proposed algorithm exploits the modular structure present in many models of practical relevance, and often successfully avoids the explicit synchronous composition of subsystems and thereby the state explosion problem. Experimental results show that the method can be used to verify industrial applications of considerable complexity

On the set of certain conflicts of a given language

Two concurrent processes are said to be in conflict if they can get trapped in a situation where they both are waiting or running endlessly, forever unable to complete their common task. In the design of reactive systems, this is a common fault which can be very subtle and hard to detect. This paper studies conflicts in more detail and characterises the most general set of behaviours of a process which certainly leads to a conflict when accepted by another process running in parallel. It shows how this set of certain conflicts can be used to simplify the automatic detection of conflicts and thus the verification of reactive systems

Compositional nonblocking verificationusing generalised nonblocking abstractions

This paper proposes a method for compositional verification of the standard and generalized nonblocking properties of large discrete event systems. The method is efficient as it avoids the explicit construction of the complete state space by considering and simplifying individual subsystems before they are composed further. Simplification is done using a set of abstraction rules preserving generalized nonblocking equivalence, which are shown to be correct and computationally feasible. Experimental results demonstrate the suitability of the method to verify several large-scale discrete event systems models both for standard and generalized nonblocking

Generalised Nonblocking

This paper studies the nonblocking check used in supervisory control of discrete event systems and its limitations. Different examples with different liveness requirements are discussed. It is shown that the standard nonblocking check can be used to specify most requirements of interest, but that it lacks expressive power in a few cases. A generalised nonblocking check is proposed to overcome the weakness, and its relationship to standard nonblocking is explored. Results suggest that generalised nonblocking, while having the same useful properties with respect to synthesis and compositional verification, can provide for more concise problem representations in some cases

Conflict-preserving abstraction of discrete event systems using annotated automata

This paper proposes to enhance compositional verification of the nonblocking property of discrete event systems by introducing annotated automata. Annotations store nondeterministic branching information, which would otherwise be stored in extra states and transitions. This succinct representation makes it easier to simplify automata and enables new efficientmeans of abstraction, reducing the size of automata to be composed and thus the size of the synchronous product state space encountered in verification. The abstractions proposed are of polynomial complexity, and they have been successfully applied to model check the nonblocking property of the same set of large-scale industrial examples as used in related work

Supervisory control with progressive events

This paper investigates some limitations of the nonblocking property when used for supervisor synthesis in discrete event systems. It is shown that there are cases where synthesis with the nonblocking property gives undesired results. To address such cases, the paper introduces progressive events as a means to specify more precisely how a synthesised supervisor should complete its tasks. The nonblocking property is modified to take progressive events into account, and appropriate methods for verification and synthesis are proposed

Modular nonblocking verification using conflict equivalence

This paper proposes a modular approach to verifying whether a large discrete event system is nonconflicting. The new approach avoids computing the synchronous product of a large set of finite-state machines. Instead, the synchronous product is computed gradually, and intermediate results are simplified using conflict-preserving abstractions based on process-algebraic results about fair testing. Heuristics are used to choose between different possible abstractions. Experimental results show that the method is applicable to finite-state machine models of industrial scale and brings considerable improvements in performance over other methods

Compositional synthesis of discrete event systems via synthesis equivalence

A two-pass algorithm for compositional synthesis of modular supervisors for largescale systems of composed finite-state automata is proposed. The first pass provides an efficient method to determine whether a supervisory control problem has a solution, without explicitly constructing the synchronous composition of all components. If a solution exists, the second pass yields an over-approximation of the least restrictive solution which, if nonblocking, is a modular representation of the least restrictive supervisor. Using a new type of equivalence of nondeterministic processes, called synthesis equivalence, a wide range of abstractions can be employed to mitigate state-space explosion throughout the algorithm

Supervision equivalence

This paper presents a general framework for modular synthesis of supervisors for discrete event systems. The approach is based on compositional minimisation, using concepts of process equivalence. Its result is a compact representation of a least restrictive supervisor that ensures controllability and nonblocking. The method is demonstrated to reduce the number of states to be constructed for a simple manufacturing example, and the framework is proven to be sound