Springer Dynamic Analysis of Petri Net-Based Discrete Systems: 356 (Lecture Notes in Control and Information Sciences, 356)

Design of modern digital hardware systems and of complex software systems is almost always connected with parallelism. For example, execution of an object-oriented p- gram can be considered as parallel functioning of the co-operating objects; all modern operating systems are multitasking, and the software tends to be multithread; many complex calculation tasks are solved in distributed way. But designers of the control systems probably have to face parallelism in more evident and direct way. Controllers rarely deal with just one controlled object. Usually a system of several objects is to be controlled, and then the control algorithm naturally turns to be parallel. So, classical and very deeply investigated model of discrete device, Finite State Machine, is not expressive enough for the design of control devices and systems. Theoretically in most of cases behavior of a controller can be described by an FSM, but usually it is not convenient; such FSM description would be much more complex, than a parallel specification (even as a network of several communicating FSMs). Review From the reviews: "The book ‘Dynamic Analysis of Petri Net-Based Discrete Systems’ is dedicated to the behavioral properties analysis of parallel discrete systems using the partial state space approach. … Appendix presents some additional results partially outside the book main topic, where the most interesting is the improved method for generation of prime implicants of Boolean functions. The book may be useful for researchers and engineers, including graduate students, interesting in the computer-aided design of logical control devices." (Krzysztof Galkowski, Zentralblatt MATH, Vol. 1121 (23), 2007)