Discrete Event Systems for autonomous mobile agents

Abstract Discrete Event Systems (DES) are a special type of dynamic system. The ‘state’ of these systems changes at discrete instants in time and the term ‘event’ represents the occurrence of discontinuous change (at possibly unknown intervals). Different Discrete Event Systems models are currently used for specification, verification, synthesis as well as for analysis and evaluation of different qualitative and quantitative properties of existing physical systems. The focus of this paper is the presentation of the automata and formal language model for DES introduced by Ramadge and Wonham and its application to the domain of mobile manipulator/observer agents. We demonstrate the feasibility of the DES framework for modeling, analysis and synthesis of some visually guided behaviors of agents engaged in navigational tasks and address synchronization issues between different components of the system. The use of DES formalism allows us to synthesize complex behaviors in a systematic fashion and guarantee their controllability.