Demosthenis Teneketzis

Diagnosability of discrete-event systems

Fault detection and isolation is a crucial and challenging task in the automatic control of large complex systems. We propose a discrete-event system (DES) approach to the problem of failure diagnosis. We introduce two related notions of diagnosability of DESs in the framework of formal languages and compare diagnosability with the related notions of observability and invertibility. We present a systematic procedure for detection and isolation of failure events using diagnosers and provide necessary and sufficient conditions for a language to be diagnosable. The diagnoser performs diagnostics using online observations of the system behavior; it is also used to state and verify off-line the necessary and sufficient conditions for diagnosability. These conditions are stated on the diagnoser or variations thereof. The approach to failure diagnosis presented in this paper is applicable to systems that fall naturally in the class of DESs; moreover, for the purpose of diagnosis, most continuous variable dynamic systems can be viewed as DESs at a higher level of abstraction. >

Failure diagnosis using discrete-event models

Detection and isolation of failures in large, complex systems is a crucial and challenging task. The increasingly stringent requirements on performance and reliability of complex technological systems have necessitated the development of sophisticated and systematic methods for the timely and accurate diagnosis of system failures. We propose a discrete-event systems (DES) approach to the failure diagnosis problem. This approach is applicable to systems that fall naturally in the class of DES; moreover, for the purpose of diagnosis, continuous-variable dynamic systems can often be viewed as DES at a higher level of abstraction. We present a methodology for modeling physical systems in a DES framework and illustrate this method with examples. We discuss the notion of diagnosability, the construction procedure of the diagnoser, and necessary and sufficient conditions for diagnosability. Finally, we illustrate our approach using realistic models of two different heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems, one diagnosable and the other not diagnosable. While the modeling methodology presented here has been developed for the purpose of failure diagnosis, its scope is not restricted to this problem; it can also be used to develop DES models for other purposes such as control.

Diagnosability of stochastic discrete-event systems

We investigate diagnosability of stochastic discrete-event systems. We define the notions of A- and AA-diagnosability for stochastic automata; these notions are weaker than the corresponding notion of diagnosability for logical automata introduced by Sampath et al. Through the construction of a stochastic diagnoser, we determine offline conditions necessary and sufficient to guarantee A-diagnosability and sufficient to guarantee AA-diagnosability. We also show how the stochastic diagnoser can be used for on-line diagnosis of failure events. We illustrate the results through two examples from HVAC systems.

Distributed estimation algorithms for nonlinear systems

In this paper, we consider the problem of combining the local conditional distributions of a random variable which have been generated by local observers having access to their private information. Sufficient statistics for the local distributions are communicated to a coordinator, who attempts to reconstruct the global centralized distribution using only the communicated statistics. We obtain a distributed processing algorithm which recovers exactly the centralized conditional distribution. The results can be applied in designing distributed hypothesis-testing algorithms for event-driven systems.

Failure diagnosis using discrete event models

We propose a discrete event systems (DES) approach to the failure diagnosis problem. We present a methodology for modeling physical systems in a DES framework. We discuss the notion of diagnosability and present the construction procedure of the diagnoser. Finally, we illustrate our approach using a heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) system.<<ETX>>

On the Structure of Optimal Real-Time Encoders and Decoders in Noisy Communication

The output of a discrete-time Markov source must be encoded into a sequence of discrete variables. The encoded sequence is transmitted through a noisy channel to a receiver that must attempt to reproduce reliably the source sequence. Encoding and decoding must be done in real-time and the distortion measure does not tolerate delays. The structure of real-time encoding and decoding strategies that jointly minimize an average distortion measure over a finite horizon is determined. The results are extended to the real-time broadcast problem and a real-time variation of the Wyner-Ziv problem

Multi-Armed Bandit Problems

Multi-armed bandit (MAB) problems are a class of sequential resource allocation problems concerned with allocating one or more resources among several alternative (competing) projects. Such problems are paradigms of a fundamental conflict between making decisions (allocating resources) that yield high current rewards, versus making decisions that sacrifice current gains with the prospect of better future rewards. The MAB formulation models resource allocation problems arising in several technological and scientific disciplines such as sensor management, manufacturing systems, economics, queueing and communication networks, clinical trials, control theory, search theory, etc. (see [88] and references therein).

Failure diagnosis of dynamic systems: an approach based on discrete event systems

We present the salient features of a methodology for failure diagnosis of dynamic systems that can be modeled as discrete event systems. This methodology was introduced by Sampath et al. for centralized systems and subsequently extended by Debouk et al. (2000) for certain classes of decentralized systems. We discuss how to perform detection and identification of unobservable fault events using diagnosers, which are finite-state automata that are built from the discrete-event model of the system under consideration. Examples of diagnosers are given. Comparisons with other methodologies for diagnosing dynamic systems are given.

Diagnosis of Intermittent Faults

The diagnosis of “intermittent” faults in dynamic systems modeled as discrete event systems is considered. In many systems, faulty behavior often occurs intermittently, with fault events followed by corresponding “reset” events for these faults, followed by new occurrences of fault events, and so forth. Since these events are usually unobservable, it is necessary to develop diagnostic methodologies for intermittent faults. Prior methodologies for detection and isolation of permanent faults are no longer adequate in the context of intermittent faults, since they do not account explicitly for the dynamic behavior of these faults. This paper addresses this issue by: (i) proposing a modeling methodology for discrete event systems with intermittent faults; (ii) introducing new notions of diagnosability associated with fault and reset events; and (iii) developing necessary and sufficient conditions, in terms of the system model and the set of observable events, for these notions of diagnosability. The definitions of diagnosability are complementary and capture desired objectives regarding the detection and identification of faults, resets, and the current system status (namely, is the fault present or absent). The associated necessary and sufficient conditions are based upon the technique of “diagnosers” introduced in earlier work, albeit the structure of the diagnosers needs to be enhanced to capture the dynamic nature of faults in the system model. The diagnosability conditions are verifiable in polynomial time in the number of states of the diagnosers.

Optimal Strategies for Communication and Remote Estimation With an Energy Harvesting Sensor

We consider a remote estimation problem with an energy harvesting sensor and a remote estimator. The sensor observes the state of a discrete-time source which may be a finite state Markov chain or a multidimensional linear Gaussian system. It harvests energy from its environment (say, for example, through a solar cell) and uses this energy for the purpose of communicating with the estimator. Due to randomness of the energy available for communication, the sensor may not be able to communicate all of the time. The sensor may also want to save its energy for future communications. The estimator relies on messages communicated by the sensor to produce real-time estimates of the source state. We consider the problem of finding a communication scheduling strategy for the sensor and an estimation strategy for the estimator that jointly minimizes the expected sum of communication and distortion costs over a finite time horizon. Our goal of joint optimization leads to a decentralized decision-making problem. By viewing the problem from the estimators perspective, we obtain a dynamic programming characterization for the decentralized decision-making problem that involves optimization over functions. Under some symmetry assumptions on the source statistics and the distortion metric, we show that an optimal communication strategy is described by easily computable thresholds and that the optimal estimate is a simple function of the most recently received sensor observation.