A Petri net approach to fault detection and diagnosis in distributed systems. I. Application to telecommunication networks, motivations, and modelling

This paper presents a new use of safe Petri nets in the field of distributed discrete event systems, with application to telecommunication network management. This study has in its long range objectives to provide a generic supervisor, which can be easily distributed on a set of sensors. Petri nets are used to provide both a model and an algorithm in fault management domain. Key features of our approach are (1) we take advantage of the ability of Petri Nets to model concurrency in distributed systems, (2) we refuse using the marking graph in our algorithms in order to avoid state explosion and thus rely instead in the so-called partial order semantics of Petri nets, and (3) our algorithms use net unfolding techniques and extend them to the probabilistic case by providing a generalized Viterbi algorithm. This paper concentrates on application, motivations, and modelling