Continuous Diagnosis of Discrete-event Systems

This paper presents a diagnostic technique that subsumes two complementary approaches to diagnosis of discrete-event systems (DESs), namely the diagnoser approach and the active system approach. The more significant shortcomings of such approaches are, on the one side, the need for the generation of the global system model and, on the other, the completion of the system observation before starting the diagnostic task. The former makes the application of the diagnoser approach prohibitive in real contexts, where the system model is too large to be generated, even off-line. The latter makes it impossible to the active system approach to perform diagnosis while monitoring. The proposed technique, which overcomes such limitations, copes with a generalized class of DESs that integrate both synchronous and asynchronous behavior.