Deciding Relabeling Observation Consistency in Multi-Agent Discrete-Event Systems

Abstract

Scalable supervisors for multi-agent discrete-event systems control groups of isomorphic agents through a common template. Under partial observation, such a supervisor is maximally permissive if the relabeling that maps the agents onto their template is relabeling observation consistent (ROC) and a local companion condition holds. Whether ROC is decidable was open. We show that it is PSPACE-complete: for nondeterministic plants with two observable and one unobservable event, and for deterministic plants with two observable and two unobservable events. On the tractable side, we characterize the relabelings that guarantee ROC for every plant, we give a polynomial-time algorithm for deterministic plants whose relabeling is injective on unobservable events, and we give sufficient conditions based on saturation and on simulation, with polynomial-time tests for both. We further show that ROC is compositional for components with pairwise disjoint templates, with equivalence if the alphabets are moreover pairwise disjoint, and that neither hypothesis can be dropped. Finally, we show that the structural condition proposed in the literature to guarantee ROC is incorrect, and repair the companion inclusion that the same proposition asserts.