Complexity of Deciding Detectability in Discrete Event Systems
For researchers in discrete event systems, this work shows that weak detectability remains hard even in simple cases, ruling out tractable subclasses, but offers a parallel algorithm for strong detectability.
The paper proves that checking weak (periodic) detectability in discrete event systems remains intractable even for structurally simple systems without non-trivial cycles, while strong (periodic) detectability can be efficiently verified on parallel computers.
Detectability of discrete event systems (DESs) is a question whether the current and subsequent states can be determined based on observations. Shu and Lin designed a polynomial-time algorithm to check strong (periodic) detectability and an exponential-time (polynomial-space) algorithm to check weak (periodic) detectability. Zhang showed that checking weak (periodic) detectability is PSpace-complete. This intractable complexity opens a question whether there are structurally simpler DESs for which the problem is tractable. In this paper, we show that it is not the case by considering DESs represented as deterministic finite automata without non-trivial cycles, which are structurally the simplest deadlock-free DESs. We show that even for such very simple DESs, checking weak (periodic) detectability remains intractable. On the contrary, we show that strong (periodic) detectability of DESs can be efficiently verified on a parallel computer.