IEEE CONTROL SYSTEMS SOCIETY TECHNICAL COMMITTEE
ON DISCRETE EVENT SYSTEMS

    Ryan J. Leduc
    Chair, IEEE CSS Technical Committee on DES
    Dept. of Computing and Software
    McMaster University
    1280 Main Street West
    Hamilton, Ontario
    Canada L8S 4K1

    Phone: (905) 525-9140 Ext. 27962
    Fax: (905) 524-0340
    e-mail: leduc@mcmaster.ca
    WWW: http://www.cas.mcmaster.ca/~leduc/

DESTC Web Page: http://www.cas.mcmaster.ca/destc/

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Contents:

1. Editorial

2. Announcements
 2.1 DES Online Research Resource Database (ORRD) and CDC'07
 2.2 PhD position at Concordia University (Montreal, Canada): Decentralized
     supervisory control of discrete-event systems

3. Conferences
 3.1 CHINA 2008 Workshop: Concurrency methods: Issues and Applications,
     Xi'an, China, June 24, 2008
 3.2 The Second International Conference on Tests and Proofs, Prato,
     Italy, April 9 - 11, 2008
 3.3 Sixth ACM-IEEE International Conference on Formal Methods and Models
     for Codesign(MEMOCODE), Anaheim, CA, USA, June 5 - 7, 2008
 3.4 16th IEEE Mediterranean Conference on Control and Automation -
     MED'08,  Ajaccio, France, June 25 - 27, 2008

4. Journals
 4.1 Discrete Event Dynamic Systems, Volume 17 Number 4, December 2007

Welcome to the newsletter of the IEEE Control Systems Technical Committee on Discrete Event Systems!

See http://www.cas.mcmaster.ca/destc/ for information on the DESTC.

Personal note from the editor:

Welcome to the November 2007 newsletter,

Ryan Leduc

Contributed by: Ryan Leduc <leduc aT mcmaster dOt ca>

DES ONLINE RESEARCH RESOURCE DATABASE (ORRD) AND CDC'07

In the June 2007 edition of the DESTC newsletter, we announced the
launch of a new type of website to create a searchable database of DES
related resources (papers, reports, theses, etc). Please refer to the
June 2007 edition of the newsletter for details.

I will be attending the IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, 2007,
in New Orleans, LA, USA, in December to present a paper.  If you would
like an account on the ORRD system, are having trouble with your
account, or would just like to learn more about what you can do with
the ORRD, feel free to come and talk to me after my presentation.

If you haven't checked it out yet, please do so at the link below.  I
also hope that you will take the time to add your own papers to the
database to make it easier for other researchers to find your work.
This can be a great resource for all of us, both to find DES related
papers/books/reports/theses etc.  and to announce them,  but it
requires that we do our part to make sure our own papers get added.

Ryan Leduc
DESTC Chair

DES ORRD: http://www.cas.mcmaster.ca/~desorrd/

Contributed by: Peyman Gohari <gohari@ece.concordia.ca>

PHD POSITION AT CONCORDIA UNIVERSITY (MONTREAL, CANADA): DECENTRALIZED
SUPERVISORY CONTROL OF DISCRETE-EVENT SYSTEMS

I am looking for a Ph.D. student to work in the general area of 
decentralized supervisory control of discrete-event systems starting 
fall 2008. Eligible candidates are expected to have a strong 
background in electrical engineering or computer science, and a basic 
familiarity with the other subject. The salary is $16,000/year. 
Concordia University provides tuition waivers, but it is the 
responsibility of the student to secure one him or herself.

If you are interested, please send gohari@ece.concordia.ca all of the 
following documents in _one email_:

1. Your graduate and undergraduate transcripts;

2. A 3-5 page "summary report" of the paper Control from Computer 
Science by Oded Maler 
(http://www-verimag.imag.fr/~maler/Papers/cfromcs.pdf).  The report 
should reflect your understanding of the paper, and also demonstrate 
your ability to write a technical report;

3. Your up-to-date CV, which must include a list of your publications.

Once selected, for me to make you a formal offer, you must have 
already applied to the PhD program in the Department of Electrical and 
Computer Engineering, Concordia University. Thus, in order to speed up 
the process, you are encouraged to apply at your earliest convenience 
(i.e. before this position is closed).

Contributed by: Ryan Leduc <leduc aT mcmaster dOt ca>

CHINA 2008 WORKSHOP: CONCURRENCY METHODS: ISSUES AND APPLICATIONS
Xi'an, China
June 24, 2008

                 First CALL FOR PAPER

CHINA 2008 Workshop (Concurrency methods: Issues and Applications)

A satellite workshop of PETRI NETS 2008 co-located with ACSD 2008

June 24, 2008 - Xi'an, China.

Important Dates:
-  Deadline for submissions                March 20, 2008
-  Notification of acceptance/rejection    May 1,    2008
-  Deadline for pre-proceedings            June 1,   2008
-  Workshop                                June 24,  2008

Contact: China-Chairs@liacs.nl
-  Jetty Kleijn (The Netherlands)
-  Maciej Koutny (United Kingdom)

The main objective of the workshop is to be a meeting place, in two
ways.

It is intended to be a forum to exchange ideas and experiences with
different methods for the study of concurrent and distributed systems.
In addition, it will also be a meeting place for researchers from China
and neighbouring countries with the participants of the PETRI NETS and
ACSD conferences.

The scope of the workshop is broad. Its goal is to discuss models of
concurrency with an emphasis on issues relevant to certain application
domains which have led or could lead to the addition of structural
enhancements.

The focus of the workshop will be on qualitative rather than
quantitative aspects of concurrent systems. For the (enhanced) models
under discussion, also analysis techniques, extended or even completely
new, are to be considered. The meeting is deliberately not focussed on
any particular model of concurrency, issue or application. Fundamental
approaches as well as interdisciplinary applications may be discussed.

Aspects which are of interest to the workshop (in combination with
techniques for analysis, verification and synthesis) include:

(i) Concurrency models: Petri nets, process algebras, cooperating
automata, coordination languages, rewriting systems, discrete event
systems, message sequence charts, temporal logics

(ii) Issues: synchrony / asynchrony, mobility and security, locality
and components, supervisory control, dynamic reconfiguration, resource
access / testing, collaboration schemes, behavioural equivalence

(iii) Application areas: asynchronous circuits, GALS systems,
biological systems, membrane systems, mobile process networks,
architecture, component based software, workflow systems, communication
protocols

Two types of submissions are solicited:

(i) Original contributions: full papers or extended abstracts describing
new and ongoing work which have not been submitted elsewhere or already
published.

(ii) Informal contributions: posters presenting initial ideas, or
presentations significantly based on already published work (possibly in
a language other than English)  for which the authors seek feedback.
(The latter under the condition that the prior work is adequately
referenced, and there are no publisher's restrictions.)

Prospective participants are asked to submit by email (to
China-Chairs@liacs.nl) an extended abstract of at most 15 pages as PDF
or PS and using the Springer LNCS-format
(http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html). Submissions will be
reviewed by the Programme Committee, and they should include a title,
the authors' contact addresses and email, and an abstract. Moreover, in
the covering mail, it should be clearly stated whether the submission
should be considered as an original paper.

At least one of the authors of each accepted contribution should
register and take part in the workshop to give the presentation.

Extended abstracts of accepted contributions will be included in the
workshop proceedings and available at the meeting.

Some of the best, original contributions from the workshop will be
invited to be submitted to a volume of the journal sub-series of Lecture
Notes in Computer Science entitled "Transactions on Petri Nets and Other
Models of Concurrency" (ToPNoC). These papers, revised according to the
workshop reviewers' comments and the feedback received at the workshop,
will go through a totally new round of reviewing as is standard practice
for journal papers.

Programme Committee

M.Bednarczyk (Poland)
M.ter Beek (Italy)
Y.Bin (China)
M.Bonsangue (Netherlands)
J.Carmona (Spain)
T.Chothia (Netherlands)
S.Christensen (Denmark)
G.Ciobanu (Romania)
J.-M. Colom (Spain)
P.Darondeau (France)
Z.Duan (China)
S.Gnesi (Italy)
L.Gomes (Portugal)
A.Gordon (UK)
S.Haddad (France)
K.Hao (China)
H.Hong (China)
R.Janicki (Canada)
E.Kindler
H.Klaudel (France)
J.Kleijn (Netherlands, chair)
A.Kondratyev (USA)
M.Koutny (UK, chair)
Z.Liu (China)
R.Lorenz (Germany)
H.Miao (China)
M.Mukund (India)
G.Pappalardo (Italy)
G.Paun (Spain)
L.Pomello (Italy)
W.Vogler (Germany)
K.Wolf (Germany)
A.Yakovlev (UK)

web site: click here

Contributed by: Ryan Leduc <leduc aT mcmaster dOt ca>

THE SECOND INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON TESTS AND PROOFS
Prato, Italy
April 9 - 11, 2008

          Call for papers (NEW SUBMISSION DEADLINES)

Purpose and Scope

(NEW SUBMISSION DEADLINES. ABSTRACT: NOV 11, 2007; PAPER: NOV 18, 2007)


The TAP conference is devoted to the convergence of proofs and tests.
It combines ideas from both sides for the advancement of software quality.

To prove the correctness of a program is to demonstrate, through
impeccable mathematical techniques, that it has no bugs; to test a
program is to run it with the expectation of discovering bugs. The two
techniques seem contradictory: if you have proved your program, it's
fruitless to comb it for bugs; and if you are testing it, that is
surely a sign that you have given up on any hope to prove its correctness.

Accordingly, proofs and tests have, since the onset of software
engineering research, been pursued by distinct communities using rather
different techniques and tools.

And yet the development of both approaches leads to the discovery of
common issues and to the realization that each may need the other. The
emergence of model checking has been one of the first signs that
contradiction may yield to complementarity, but in the past few years
an increasing number of research efforts have encountered the need for
combining proofs and tests, dropping earlier dogmatic views of
incompatibility and taking instead the best of what each of these
software engineering domains has to offer.

The conference will include a mix of invited and submitted
presentation, and a generous allocation of panels and informal discussions.
Topics

Possible topics include (as an indicative rather than exhaustive list):

    * Generation of test data, oracles, or preambles by deductive
techniques such as
          o theorem proving,
          o model checking,
          o symbolic execution,
          o constraint logic programming, 
      etc.
    * Generation of specifications by deduction
    * Verification techniques combining proofs and tests
    * Program proving with the aid of testing techniques
    * Transfer of concepts from testing to proving (e.g., coverage
criteria)
    * Automatic bug finding
    * Formal frameworks
    * Tool descriptions and experience reports
    * Case studies

Proceedings
The proceedings will be published within Springer's LNCS series and
they will be available at the conference.

web site: click here

Contributed by: Ryan Leduc <leduc aT mcmaster dOt ca>

SIXTH ACM-IEEE INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON FORMAL METHODS AND MODELS
FOR CODESIGN(MEMOCODE)
Anaheim, CA, USA
June 5 - 7, 2008

                       CALL FOR PAPERS

The sixth MEMOCODE conference will gather researchers and
practitioners who design modern hardware/software systems.
Our goal is to consider new formal and systematic techniques
for the design of dependable hardware/software systems. Many
new languages, abstractions, refinement and analysis
techniques already proved to provide a sound methodological
basis for high-level modeling, design, and development of
hardware and software systems including the adaptation and
re-use of existing components.

We invite papers, panel proposals, and tutorial proposals on
the application of formal methods to hardware and software design.

Topics include

    * dependable design methodologies
    * specification and modeling of hardware/software systems
    * formal verification (model checking, theorem proving)
    * specification-based testing
    * dependable synthesis methods for hardware and software
    * component-based design and design space exploration
    * optimization and hardware/software partitioning
    * performance/power analysis

IMPORTANT DATES

   Paper submission                 February 1, 2008
   Panels and tutorials             April 11, 2008
   Notification of acceptance       March 31, 2008
   Final Version of Papers          April 11, 2008

DESIGN CONTEST

MEMOCODE will again run a design contest. Please refer to
http://rijndael.ece.vt.edu/memocontest08 for more information.

PROCEEDINGS 
 
Conference proceedings will be published by the IEEE Computer
Society.  Best papers of previous MEMOCODE conferences have
been published in special issues of international journals
including ACM TECS and Springer's FMSD.
   
PAPER SUBMISSION

Submissions of research and experience papers will only be
accepted through the conference web site.  Papers must not
exceed 10 pages and must be formatted following IEEE Computer
Society guidelines.  Submissions must be written in English,
describe original work, and not substantially overlap papers
that have been published or are being submitted to a journal
or another conference with published proceedings.

CHAIRS

General Chairs
Forrest Brewer, UC Santa Barbara, USA
Rajesh Gupta, UC San Diego, USA

Program Chairs
Stephen A. Edwards, Columbia, USA
Klaus Schneider, Kaiserslautern, Germany

Publicity Chair
Fei Xie, Portland State, USA

Panel Chair
Luca Carloni, Columbia, USA

Industry Chair
Arvind, MIT, USA

Local Arrangements
Forrest Brewer, UC Santa Barbara, USA

TECHNICAL PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Arvind, MIT, USA  
Twan Basten, Eindhoven, Netherlands
Forrest Brewer, UC Santa Barbara, USA
Tevfik Bultan, UC Santa Barbara, USA
Luca Carloni, Columbia, USA
Stephen A. Edwards, Columbia, USA
Masahiro Fujita, Tokyo, Japan
Franco Fummi, Verona, Italy              
Ganesh Gopalakrishnan, Utah, USA
Rajesh Gupta, UC San Diego, USA
Connie Heitmeyer, NRL, USA
James Hoe, CMU, USA
Ahmed Jerraya, CEA, France
Thomas Kropf, Bosch, Germany
Luciano Lavagno, Politecnico di Torino, Italy
Elizabeth Leonard, NRL, USA
John O'Leary, Intel, USA
Zebo Peng, Linkoping, Sweden
Carl Pixley, Synopsys, USA
Patrick Schaumont, Virginia Tech, USA
Klaus Schneider, Kaiserslautern, Germany
Sandeep Shukla, Virginia Tech, USA
R. K. Shyamasundar, TIFR, India
Jean-Pierre Talpin, INRIA, France
P. S. Thiagarajan, Singapore
Reinhard Wilhelm, Saarland University, Germany
Fei Xie, Portland State, USA

web site: click here

Contributed by: Ryan Leduc <leduc aT mcmaster dOt ca>

16TH IEEE MEDITERRANEAN CONFERENCE ON CONTROL AND AUTOMATION - MED'08
Ajaccio, France
June 25 - 27, 2008

The 16th annual IEEE Mediterranean Conference on Control and
Automation, MED is recognized among scientific and engineering
conference dedicated to the advancement of the theory and practice of
systems and control. It aims to facilitate technology transfer
primarily within the countries of the Mediterranean region. The MED
Conference brings together an international community of researchers
and practitioners to discuss new research results, perspectives on
future developments, and innovative applications relevant to decision
making, automatic control, and related areas. The emphasis is placed on
practice of those technologies, but such theoretical researches as
accompanied with practical experience/consideration will be also
welcome. Authors are invited to submit full papers describing original
research. Areas of interest include, but are not limited to: Adaptive
control, Aerospace control Agents and agent-based systems, Biologically
inspired systems, control, Computational Intelligence, Computer
controlled systems,Computing and communications,Decentralised control,
Discrete event systems, Distributed systems, Education and training,
Embedded control systems, Fuzzy systems, Genetic and evolutionary
computation, Hybrid systems, Image processing, Industrial automation,
manufacturing, Intelligent control systems, Intelligent
transportation systems, Linear systems, Marine control, Modelling and
simulation, Neural networks, Non-linear systems, Optimisation, Petri
Nets, Power systems, Predictive control, Process control, Real-time
control, Robotics, Robust control, Spectral estimation, Swarms,
Unmanned Systems, Virtual reality.

The 16th annual IEEE Mediterranean Conference on Control and
Automation, MED will feature the presentation of contributed and
invited papers, as well as tutorial sessions and workshops. It is
co-sponsored by the IEEE Control Systems Society (CSS).

PAPER SUBMISSION:
Please submit full papers describing original work in detail by 15
January 2008.

INVITED SESSIONS:
The Technical Program Committee is soliciting proposals for invited
sessions focusing on topics of the conference. Prospective organizers
should submit a summary statement describing the motivation and
relevance of the proposed session to the Technical Co-Chairman, Pr.
Christophe Aubrun via email christophe.aubrun@cran.uhp-nancy.fr by 15
January 2008.

WORKSHOP /TUTORIALS:
Proposals for workshops - tutorials should include the title session,
the list of speakers, and extended summaries (2000 words). Proposals
must be sent by e-mail to corresponding Technical Co-Chairman Pr.
Mohamed Darouach (mohamed.darouach@iut-longwy.uhp-nancy.fr) by 15
January 2008.

IMPORTANT DATES:
Deadline for Full Paper submission January 15, 2008
Notification of Acceptance March 10, 2008
Camera Ready Manuscript Submission March 31, 2008

web site: click here

Contributed by: Ryan Leduc <leduc aT mcmaster dOt ca>

DISCRETE EVENT DYNAMIC SYSTEMS
VOLUME 17 NUMBER 4
DECEMBER, 2007

1) Concurrent Secrets

E. Badouel, M. Bednarczyk, A. Borzyszkowski, B. Caillaud, P. Darondeau

Abstract:

Given a finite state system with partial observers and for each
observer, a regular set of trajectories which we call a secret, we
consider the question whether the observers can ever find out that a
trajectory of the system belongs to some secret. We search for a
regular control on the system, enforcing the specified secrets on the
observers, even though they have full knowledge of this control. We
show that an optimal control always exists although it is generally not
regular. We state sufficient conditions for computing a finite and
optimal control of the system enforcing the concurrent secret as desired.

2) Identification of Petri Nets from Knowledge of Their Language

Maria Paola Cabasino, Alessandro Giua, Carla Seatzu

Abstract:

In this paper we deal with the problem of identifying a Petri net
system, given a finite language generated by it. First we consider the
problem of identifying a free labeled Petri net system, i.e., all
transition labels are distinct. The set of transitions and the number
of places is assumed to be known, while the net structure and the
initial marking are computed solving an integer programming problem.
Then we extend this approach in several ways introducing additional
information about the model (structural constraints, conservative
components, stationary sequences) or about its initial marking. We also
treat the problem of synthesizing a bounded net system starting from an
automaton that generates its language. Finally, we show how the
approach can also be generalized to the case of labeled Petri nets,
where two or more transitions may share the same label. In particular,
in this case we impose that the resulting net system is deterministic.
In both cases the identification problem can still be solved via an
integer programming problem.

3) Compositional Synthesis of Maximally Permissive Supervisors Using
Supervision Equivalence

Hugo Flordal, Robi Malik, Martin Fabian, Knut Akesson

Abstract:

This paper presents a general framework for efficient synthesis of
supervisors for discrete event systems. The approach is based on
compositional minimisation, using concepts of process equivalence. In
this context, a large number of ways are suggested how a finite-state
automaton can be simplified such that the results of supervisor
synthesis are preserved. The proposed approach yields a compact
representation of a least restrictive supervisor that ensures
controllability and nonblocking. The method is demonstrated on a simple
manufacturing example to significantly reduce the number of states
constructed for supervisor synthesis.

4) Optimal Control of Two-Stage Discrete Event Systems with Real-Time
Constraints

Jianfeng Mao, Christos G. Cassandras

Abstract:

We consider discrete event systems (DES) involving tasks with real-time
constraints and seek to control processing times so as to minimize a
cost function subject to each task meeting its own constraint. When
tasks are processed over a single stage, it has been shown that there
are structural properties of the optimal sample path that lead to very
efficient solutions of such problems. When tasks are processed over
multiple stages and are subject to end-to-end real-time constraints,
these properties no longer hold and no obvious extensions are known. We
consider a two-stage problem with homogeneous cost functions over all
tasks at each stage and derive several new optimality properties. These
properties lead to the idea of introducing "virtual" deadlines at the
first stage, thus partially decoupling the stages so that the known
efficient solutions for single-stage problems can be used. We prove
that the solution obtained by an iterative virtual deadline algorithm
(VDA) converges to the global optimal solution of the two-stage problem
and illustrate the efficiency of the VDA through numerical examples.

5) Active Acquisition of Information for Diagnosis and Supervisory
Control of Discrete Event Systems

David Thorsley, Demosthenis Teneketzis

Abstract:

This paper considers the problems of fault diagnosis and supervisory
control in discrete event systems through the context of a new
observation paradigm. For events that are considered observable, a cost
is incurred each time a sensor is activated in an attempt to make an
event observation. In such a situation the best strategy is to perform
an "active acquisition" of information, i.e. to choose which sensors
need to be activated based on the information state generated from the
previous readings of the system. Depending on the sample path executed
by the system, different sensors may be turned on or off at different
stages of the process. We consider the active acquisition of
information problem for both logical and stochastic discrete event
systems. We consider three classes of increasing complexity: firstly,
for acyclic systems where events are synchronized to clock ticks;
secondly, for acyclic untimed systems; and lastly, for general cyclic
automata. For each of these cases we define a notion of information
state for the problem, determine conditions for the existence of an
optimal policy, and construct a dynamic program to find an optimal
policy where one exists. For large systems, a limited lookahead
algorithm for computational savings is proposed.

web site: click here