Extending the hierarchical interface-based supervisory control platform

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The proposed research  investigates the use of discrete-event systems (DES) as a software design, specification and synthesis tool. The advantages of this approach is that it provides an intuitive graphical representation  of the systems behaviour as well as a precise formal description immediately usable for verification and synthesis. The automata can then be used for code generation for the target software language.    The research will target  three of the main obstacles to this approach: 1) a design, verification, and synthesis method capable of handling industrial strength problems,  2) a reliable real-time implementation method for DES supervisors, and  3) a graphical software tool to implement the algorithms and allow users to design, verify, synthesize, and  simulate DES based systems, and automatically generate code based on the results.      The hierarchical interface-based supervisory control (HISC) method from the applicant's doctoral thesis will be used as a foundation. This approach develops well defined interfaces between components to provide the structure to allow local checks to guarantee global properties such as controllability  or nonblocking. Additionally, the development of clean interfaces facilitates parallel development and re-use of the component subsystems.  This approach will be extended to be more flexible and scalable. The next step will be to adapt timed DES, DES fault diagnosis, and a discrete optimization method to the new framework. An implementation method that uses the framework will then be developed, based upon the applicant's masters thesis.    In addition, the DES results will be extended to more general and complex software verification approaches such as model checking and predicate logic based descriptions verified using theorem provers. This should enable these approaches to scale significantly better.    Finally, a software tool will be developed to implement the above theory. The software tool will be developed open source in order to encourage other academics to use, test, and contribute to the software.