Diagnosis is the task of detecting fault occurrences in a partially observed system. Depending on the possible observations, a discrete-event system may be diagnosable or not. Active diagnosis aims at controlling the system to render it diagnosable. In the past, the main analyzed criterion of the quality of an active diagnoser has been the delay between the fault occurrence and its detection. Here we generalize this study by (1) associating costs or rewards with faulty runs, (2) defining three related decision problems, and (3) analyzing their decidability/complexity in the non-deterministic and probabilistic frameworks under several hypotheses. We study non-deterministic and probabilistic semantics and compare their decidability and complexity. In particular, we exhibit one problem decidable for non-deterministic systems but undecidable for probabilistic ones. Furthermore we establish tight lower and upper bounds for the size of the active diagnoser (when it exists).

A central task in partially observed controllable system is to detect or prevent the occurrence of certain events called faults. Systems for which one can design a controller avoiding the faults are called actively safe. Otherwise, one may require that a fault is eventually detected, which is the task of diagnosis. Systems for which one can design a controller detecting the faults are called actively diagnosable. An intermediate requirement is prediction, which consists in determining that a fault will occur whatever the future behaviour of the system. When a system is not predictable, one may be interested in designing a controller to make it so. Here we study the latter problem, called active prediction, and its associated property, active predictability. In other words, we investigate how to determine whether or not a system enjoys the active predictability property, i.e., there exists an active predictor for the system. Our contributions are threefold. From a semantical point of view, we refine the notion of predictability by adding two quantitative requirements: the minimal and maximal delay before the occurence of the fault, and we characterize the requirements fulfilled by a controller that performs predictions. Then we show that active predictability is EXPTIME-complete where the upper bound is obtained via a game-based approach. Finally we establish that active predictability is equivalent to active safety when the maximal delay is beyond a threshold depending on the size of the system, and we show that this threshold is accurate by exhibiting a family of systems fulfilling active predictability but not active safety.

Diagnosability and opacity are two well-studied problems in discrete-event systems. We revisit these two problems with respect to expressiveness and complexity issues. We first relate different notions of diagnosability and opacity. We consider in particular fairness issues and extend the definition of Germanos et al. [ACM TECS, 2015] of weakly fair diagnosability for safe Petri nets to general Petri nets and to opacity questions. Second, we provide a global picture of complexity results for the verification of diagnosability and opacity. We show that diagnosability is NL-complete for finite state systems, PSPACE-complete for safe convergent Petri nets (even with fairness), and EXPSPACE-complete for general Petri nets without fairness, while non diagnosability is inter-reducible with reachability when fault events are not weakly fair. Opacity is ESPACE-complete for safe Petri nets (even with fairness) and undecidable for general Petri nets already without fairness.

Diagnosis is the task of detecting fault occurrences in a partially observed system. Depending on the possible observations, a discrete-event system may be diagnosable or not. Active diagnosis aims at controlling the system to render it diagnosable. Past research has proposed solutions for this problem, but their complexity remains to be improved. Here, we solve the decision and synthesis problems for active diagnosability, proving that (1) our procedures are optimal with respect to computational complexity, and (2) the memory required for our diagnoser is minimal. We then study the delay between a fault occurrence and its detection by the diagnoser. We construct a memory-optimal diagnoser whose delay is at most twice the minimal delay, whereas the memory required to achieve optimal delay may be highly greater. We also provide a solution for parametrized active diagnosis, where we automatically construct the most permissive controller respecting a given delay.

In partially observed Petri nets, diagnosis is the task of detecting whether the given sequence of observed labels indicates that some unobservable fault has occurred. Diagnosability is an associated property of the Petri net, stating that in any possible execution, an occurrence of a fault can eventually be diagnosed. In this article, we consider diagnosability under the weak fairness (WF) assumption, which intuitively states that no transition from a given set can stay enabled forever—it must eventually either fire or be disabled. We show that a previous approach to WF-diagnosability in the literature has a major flaw and present a corrected notion. Moreover, we present an efficient method for verifying WF-diagnosability based on a reduction to LTL-X model checking. An important advantage of this method is that the LTL-X formula is fixed—in particular, the WF assumption does not have to be expressed as a part of it (which would make the formula length proportional to the size of the specification), but rather the ability of existing model checkers to handle weak fairness directly is exploited.

Several measures have been proposed in literature for quantifying the information leaked by the public outputs of a program with secret inputs. We consider the problem of computing information leaked by a deterministic or probabilistic program when the measure of information is based on (a) min-entropy and (b) Shannon entropy. The key challenge in computing these measures is that we need the total number of possible outputs and, for each possible output, the number of inputs that lead to it. A direct computation of these quantities is infeasible because of the state-explosion problem. We therefore propose symbolic algorithms based on binary decision diagrams (BDDs). The advantage of our approach is that these symbolic algorithms can be easily implemented in any BDD-based model-checking tool that checks for reachability in deterministic non-recursive programs by computing program summaries. We demonstrate the validity of our approach by implementing these algorithms in a tool Moped-QLeak, which is built upon Moped, a model checker for Boolean programs. Finally, we show how this symbolic approach extends to probabilistic programs.

We study the following summarization problem: given a parallel composition A=A1||...||An of labelled transition systems communicating with the environment through a distinguished component Ai, efficiently compute a summary Si such that E||A and E||Si are trace-equivalent for every environment E. While Si can be computed using elementary automata theory, the resulting algorithm suffers from the state-explosion problem. We present a new, simple but subtle algorithm based on net unfoldings, a partial-order semantics, give some experimental results using an implementation on top of MOLE, and show that our algorithm can handle divergences and compute weighted summaries with minor modifications.

This paper defines a framework in which one can formalize a variety of authorization and policy issues that arise in access control of shared computing resources. Instantiations of the framework address such issues as privacy, recency, validity, and trust. The paper presents an efficient algorithm for solving all authorization problems in the framework; this approach yields new algorithms for a number of specific authorization problems.