On tolerance of discrete systems with respect to transition perturbations

Abstract: Control systems should enforce a desired property for both expected modeled situations as well as unexpected unmodeled environmental situations. Existing methods focus on designing controllers to enforce the desired property only when the environment behaves as expected. However, these methods lack discussion on how the system behaves when the environment is perturbed. In this paper, we propose an approach for analyzing control systems with respect to their tolerance against environmental perturbations. A control system tolerates certain environmental perturbations when it remains capable of guaranteeing the desired property despite the perturbations. Each controller inherently has a level of tolerance against environmental perturbations. We formally define this notion of tolerance and describe a general technique to compute it, for any given regular property. We also present a more efficient method to compute tolerance with respect to invariance properties. Moreover, we introduce a new controller synthesis problem based on our notion of tolerance. We demonstrate the application of our framework on an autonomous surveillance example.