Special issue of the journal of Discrete Event Dynamic Systems : Theory and Applications on Modelling of Reactive Systems
This special issue is composed of five articles selected, augmented and rewritten from papers presented at the fifth edition of the MSR?05 conference on Modelling Reactive Systems (the francophone colloque sur la Modélisation des Systèmes Réactifs), which was held in October 2005 in Autrans, near Grenoble, France. The next MSR'07 will be held in Lyon: http://www.ens-lyon.fr/LIP/MSR07/.
It will be available as volume 17, issue 2, in may 2007. It can already be accessed on the journal website, provided you have an electronic subscription, through the "Online First" link in the "Content Status" section on the right hand of the page: http://springerlink.metapress.com/content/1573-7594/
The MSR conference covers topics of modeling, analysis and control of reactive systems, and therefore constitutes a meeting place for specialists of both control theory and computer science.
In response to the call for papers, 33 submissions were received, out of which 19 papers
were accepted for presentation at the conference. After the conference?selecting on the
basis of the reviews of the conference submissions, and considering the relevance and
importance of the papers to the topic of this special issue, five groups of authors were
invited to submit an extended version of the work they presented at MSR?05. All the
authors accepted this invitation, and their submissions were evaluated according to the strict selection procedure of the JDEDS journal, using reviewers different from those who
reviewed the conference submissions. The final versions of the accepted papers are
presented in this special issue. The topics covered in these papers feature theoretical and
applications aspects of discrete event systems and constitute a significant contribution to
state of the art.
The first two papers in this special issue cover topics related to timed discrete event
systems. The paper by Berhomieu et al. treats the undecidability of the state reachability
problem for an extension of time Petri nets, and provides efficient approximation methods
for the analysis of these systems. The second paper by Houssin et al. solves the output
tracking problem for constrained (max, +) models via extremal fixed point computations,
and applies this to the design of time tables for an urban bus network. The three other
papers in this issue deal with approaches to fault detection and supervisory control design
for large logical discrete event models. The paper by Marchand et al. develops a modular
centralized method for computing the supremal controllable language, introducing
controlled approximations of components. The next paper by Pinchinat et al. uses the
conjunctive nu-calculus providing a very general solution of the basic supervisory control
design problem. The final paper of this issue by Wang et al. uses different architectures,
involving different fusion rules, for the decentralised diagnosis of a discrete event system.
We express our gratefulness to the reviewers for their work and for their help in ensuring
the quality of the final articles, and also to the editorial board of the journal for giving us the
opportunity to present the best contributions of the MSR?05 conference in this special issue.
We also would like to dedicate this special issue to the memory of Lionel Marcé,
professor at the University of Western Brittany, France, who organized the first MSR
conference in Brest in 1996, and who passed away in March 2006.