An EFSM Approach to Software Design Based on the Supervisory Control Theory

Abstract

The research of software design, based on the supervisory control theory, is an important content in software cybernetics. The existing software model used in the software design with the supervisory control theory is Polynomial Dynamic System (PDS), which is transformed from SIGNAL files. This obstructs its widespread application. Extended Finite State Machine (EFSM) model is widely applied in software engineering field and it may alleviate the state explosion problem of Finite State Machine (FSM) to some extent. In this paper, the EFSM model is suggested to study software design problem. This paper proposed two kinds of software design problems based on EFSM model. For the first problem, a necessary and sufficient condition for software existence is obtained. For the second problem, a necessary and sufficient condition for software existence and an optimal algorithm to such software design are presented.