Revisiting delayed strong detectability of discrete-event systems

Among notions of detectability for a discrete-event system (DES), strong detectability implies that after a finite number of observations to every output/label sequence generated by the DES, the current state can be uniquely determined. This notion is strong so that by using it the current state can be easily determined. In order to keep the advantage of strong detectability and weaken its disadvantage, we can additionally take some subsequent outputs into account in order to determine the current state. Such a modified observation will make some DES that is not strongly detectable become strongly detectable in a weaker sense, which we call {it $K$-delayed strong detectability} if we observe at least $K$ outputs after the time at which the state need to be determined. In this paper, we study $K$-delayed strong detectability for DESs modeled by finite-state automata (FSAs), and give a polynomial-time verification algorithm by using a novel concurrent-composition method. Note that the algorithm applies to all FSAs. Also by the method, an upper bound for $K$ has been found, and we also obtain polynomial-time verification algorithms for $(k_1,k_2)$-detectability and $(k_1,k_2)$-D-detectability of FSAs firstly studied by [Shu and Lin, 2013]. Our algorithms run in quartic polynomial time and apply to all FSAs, are more effective than the sextic polynomial-time verification algorithms given by [Shu and Lin 2013] based on the usual assumptions of deadlock-freeness and having no unobservable reachable cycle. Finally, we obtain polynomial-time synthesis algorithms for enforcing delayed strong detectability, which are more effective than the exponential-time synthesis algorithms in the supervisory control framework in the literature.