A symbolic approach for maximally permissive deadlock avoidance in complex resource allocation systems

Paper in proceeding, 2014

To develop an efficient implementation of the maximally permissive deadlock avoidance policy (DAP) for complex resource allocation systems (RAS), a recent approach focuses on the identification of a set of critical states of the underlying RAS state-space, referred to as minimal boundary unsafe states. The availability of this information enables an expedient one-step-lookahead scheme that prevents the RAS from reaching outside its safe region. This paper presents a symbolic approach that provides those critical states. Furthermore, by taking advantage of certain structural properties regarding RAS safety, the presented method avoids the complete exploration of the underlying RAS state-space. Numerical experimentation demonstrates the efficiency of the approach for developing the maximally permissive DAP for complex RAS with large structure and state-spaces, and its potential advantage over similar approaches that employ more conventional representational and computational methods.