Fault manifestability verification for discrete event systems

Abstract

Fault diagnosis is a crucial and challenging task in the automatic control of complex systems, whose efficiency depends on the diagnosability property of a system. Diagnosability describes the system ability to determine whether a given fault has effectively occurred based on the observations. However, this is a very strong property that requires generally high number of sensors to be satisfied. Consequently, it is not rare that developing a diagnosable system is too expensive. To solve this problem, in this paper, we first define a new system property called manifestability that represents the weakest requirement on faults and observations for having a chance to identify on line fault occurrences and can be verified at design stage. Then, we propose an algorithm with PSPACE complexity to automatically verify it.