Toward a unified theory of discrete event systems

Abstract

Many man-made systems have discrete event mechanism. This paper first shows briefly a way how to construct a universal state space representations of a general discrete event system that is an input-output system with past-determinacy, stationarity, the discrete event input space, and discrete event-determinacy. The constructed state space representation for a discrete event system is minimal in a class of dynamical system representations of the system. This realization theory provides the fact that a reduced and reachable DEVS, which is originated by Zeigler[1], is unique up to isomorphism in the class of discrete event dynamical system representations. In this sense DEVS has concise information to describe discrete event dynamics. Since the Petri net formalism, that is a bit different from the DEVS formalism, is also used for the design and analysis of discrete event systems, some relation between DEVS and Petri nets is considered.