Reliable decentralized failure diagnosis of discrete event systems using single-level inference

Abstract We consider a reliable decentralized diagnosis problem for discrete event systems in the inference-based framework. This problem requires us to synthesize local diagnosers such that the occurrence of any failure string is correctly detected within a finite number of steps, even if local diagnosis decisions of some local diagnosers are not available. In the case of single-level inference, we introduce a notion of reliable 1-inference-diagnosability and show that reliable 1-inference-diagnosability is a necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of a solution to the reliable decentralized diagnosis problem. Then, we show how to verify reliable 1-inference-diagnosability effectively. When the system to be diagnosed is reliably 1-inference-diagnosable, we compute the delay bound within which the occurrence of any failure string can be detected. Local diagnosers can be constructed using the computed delay bound.