A Formal Framework for the Real-Time Management of Complex Resource Allocation Systems

A Formal Framework for the Real-Time Management of Complex Resource Allocation Systems

Spiridon Reveliotis, PhD
School of Industrial & Systems Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology

Abstract: In many contemporary applications, automation is called to play an integrating role that can
be effectively abstracted as a complex resource allocation function administering a finite set of reusable resources to a set of concurrently executing processes. Specific examples of such a function include the real-time management of the processing and the material handling equipment in flexibly automated manufacturing systems, the traffic management of guidepath-based zone- controlled transport systems through the pertinent allocation of the various guidepath-zones, the allocation of the supporting resources in internet-enabled workflow management systems, and the management of the semaphore allocation in multi-threaded software.

The autonomy, concurrency and flexibility that are sought by the aforementioned environments render the management of the corresponding resource allocation function a pretty challenging task. A complete solution to the abstracted control problem must ensure the efficiency of the resulting operation according to traditional performance measures like throughput maximization and congestion minimization, but it must also provide explicit guarantees for safety and other requirements of “behavioral correctness”. In addition, any pursued solutions must be efficiently implementable during the real-time operation of the considered systems, in view of the aforementioned operational and computational complexities.

This talk will overview a series of results from the presenter’s research program that have sought to provide a rigorous analytical solution to the aforementioned control problem, building upon the formal abstraction of “Sequential Resource Allocation System” and the control-theoretic framework of Discrete Event Systems. The considered results enable (i) a rigorous characterization of the underlying control problem, (ii) the pertinent decomposition of this problem into a number of subproblems that can be rigorously addressed by the current DES theory, (iii) the definition of pertinent notions of “optimality” for each of these subproblems and a characterization of their complexity, and (iv) the establishment of an effectively controllable trade-off between optimality and computational tractability, when the former is proven computationally (too) challenging.

Bio: Spyros Reveliotis received the Diploma degree in electrical engineering from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece, the M.Sc. degree in computer systems engineering from Northeastern University in Boston, and the Ph.D. degree in industrial engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

He is a Professor with the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, in Atlanta, GA. His main research interests are in discrete-event systems theory and its applications.

Dr. Reveliotis is an IEEE Fellow and a member of INFORMS. He has served on the editorial boards of many journals and conferences on his areas of interest. Currently, he serves as a Senior Editor for the IEEE Trans. on Automation Science and Engineering, an Associate Editor for the Journal of Discrete Event Dynamic Systems, and the Editor-in-Chief of the Editorial Board at the IEEE Conference on Automation Science and Engineering (IEEE CASE). He has also served as the Program Chair at the 2009 IEEE CASE Conference, and the General Co-Chair of the 2014 edition of the same conference. Finally, he and his students have been the recipients of a number of awards, like the 2014 Best Paper Award of the IEEE Trans. on Automation Science and Engineering.