Decentralized Diagnosis of Discrete Event Systems Using an Arborescent Architecture

Decentralized diagnosis of discrete event systems consists in detecting faults in discrete event systems by using decentralized architectures. In particular, inference-based diagnosis is a decentralized architecture of interest, since it is more general than several other decentralized architectures. In this paper, we first propose a method that realizes a diagnosis objective D by an arborescent architecture (or tree). Each leaf of the tree is a decentralized diagnosis, and each node n is a disjunction or con- junction of the diagnosis decisions of the two children of n. Then, we show that if inference-based diagnosis is applicable to D, then all the leafs of the obtained tree are basic decentralized diagnosers. This implies that every inference-based diagnosis is realizable by a combination of basic decentralized diagnosers.