Fault prognosis of discrete event systems: An overview

Abstract Fault prognosis of discrete event systems (DES) is an active field of research and has become important due to the high demand on systems’ safety and reliability. The aim of this paper is to provide the state-of-the-art on fault prognosis of DES, as well as quick directions regarding many aspects of the research on this topic. This overview was carried out using a systematic approach, which allowed us to find and select papers with minimum bias. In total, 74 papers were selected and analyzed in this overview. A classification and an analysis of these papers are made regarding the modeling formalism and decision structure of prognosis of DES. Specific notions of prognosis are also presented. A survey on these papers was performed, regarding practical applications and related problems of prognosis. Results show that most papers present solutions based on languages & automata (56), and most papers consider the centralized decision structure (45). Also, we have found 17 different papers with examples of practical applications of prognosis of DES. We have identified research gaps, such as applications of distributed prognosis and distributed prognosis of Petri nets. Finally, the research activity on prognosis of DES is growing 16.14% by year on average, accordingly to the number of published papers on this topic between 2006 and 2020.