An efficient approach for on-line diagnosis of discrete event systems

In this paper a new approach to fault diagnosis of discrete events systems modeled with Petri nets is presented. Fault events are associated to a subset of unobservable transitions of the net. Negative markings, called generalized marking, are used to estimate the explanations of the observed transitions. The generalized markings allow to cope with the problems related with the explosion of the state space estimation in a very efficient way in terms of memory usage. This feature makes the proposed approach suitable for the on-line fault diagnosis of discrete event systems.