Analysis and decentralized synthesis of distributed control systems

在上一次NSERC的资金重新分配中，电子和计算机工程方面的报告强调了这样一个事实：2000年生产的83亿个cpu中，80%用于嵌入式系统，6%用于机器人，12%用于汽车。它询问了无数的智能设备将如何相互连接，它们将如何通信，以及它们将使用什么样的管理结构，并强调这些设计挑战需要概念（而不是纯粹的技术）性质的新见解，指出即将到来的巨变“重点从信息和通信技术转移到信息和通信本身。”电话呼叫处理说明了其中的一些问题。诸如呼叫转移、呼叫等待以及其他数百种支持数字网络通信的服务（必然）是由各种不同的供应商作为独立的功能模块独立开发的，并且可以在网络中的不同点上的不同平台上实现。在花费了开发和实现的费用之后，它们经常以不可预见和不受欢迎的方式相互交互。这个所谓的“特征交互问题”是由电信行业引起研究者的注意的，并且仍然是一个昂贵的现实问题和一个活跃的研究课题。这里提出的研究将有助于系统地分析和设计复杂的分布式系统，允许早期发现和解决诸如特征交互之类的问题。独立于应用领域或技术，结果将以高级“离散事件”系统模型的形式表述。参与这项研究和相关项目的学生和博士后将继续从事工业自动化、软件工程和进一步的学术研究。

In the last NSERC funding reallocations exercise, the submission on electrical and computer engineering highlighted the fact that, of the 8.3 billion CPUs produced in 2000, 80% found their way into embedded systems, 6% into robots and 12% into automobiles.  It asked how myriad intelligent appliances would be interconnected, how they would communicate, and what kind of management structures they would use, and stressed that these design challenges required new insights of a conceptual (as opposed to purely technological) nature, pointing to a coming sea change "where the emphasis shifts from information and communication technologies to information and communication per se.''  Telephone call processing illustrates some of the problems.  Services such as call forwarding, call waiting, and the hundreds of others that support communication over digital networks, are (of necessity) developed independently, as separate functional modules, by a variety of different vendors, and may be implemented on different platforms at various points in a network.  After the expense of their development and implementation, they are often found to interact with one another in unforeseen and undesirable fashion.  This so-called "feature interaction problem'' was brought to the attention of researchers by the telecommunications industry, and remains both a costly practical problem and an active topic of research.The research proposed here will contribute systematic means of analyzing and designing complex, distributed systems, allowing the early detection and resolution of problems like feature interaction.  Independent of application domain or technology, the results will be formulated in terms of high-level ''discrete-event'' system models.   Students and postdoctoral fellows who have been involved with this research and related projects have gone on to work in industrial automation, in software engineering, and in further academic research.