Discrete Event Systems (HS 2011)

Over the past few decades the rapid evolution of computing, communication, and information technologies has brought about the proliferation of new dynamic systems. A significant part of activity in these systems is governed by operational rules designed by humans. The dynamics of these systems are characterized by asynchronous occurrences of discrete events, some controlled (e.g. hitting a keyboard key, sending a message), some not (e.g. spontaneous failure, packet loss).

The mathematical arsenal centered around differential equations that has been employed in systems engineering to model and study processes governed by the laws of nature is often inadequate or inappropriate for discrete event systems. The challenge is to develop new modeling frameworks, analysis techniques, design tools, testing methods, and optimization processes for this new generation of systems.

In this lecture we give an introduction to discrete event systems. We start out the course by studying popular models of discrete event systems, such as automata and Petri nets. In the second part of the course we analyze discrete event systems. We first examine discrete event systems from an average-case perspective: we model discrete events as stochastic processes, and then apply Markov chains and queuing theory for an understanding of the typical behavior of a system. In the last part of the course we analyze discrete event systems from a worst-case perspective using the theory of online algorithms and adversarial queuing.

Course language: German

Lecture by Prof. Roger Wattenhofer and Dr. Kai Lampka, Thursday 13.15-15.00 @ ETZ E9

Exercises by Tobias Langner, Jochen Seidel, and Jasmin Smula, Thursday 15.15-16.45 @ ETZ E9

Exam Review

After the exam grades have been published in myStudies, you can take a look at your exam until the end of March. To do so, please visit our secretary Tanja Lantz (office ETZ G88) on Monday, Tuesday, or Friday mornings.

Exam

The exam is scheduled for Monday, 6. February 2012 from 9:00 to 12:00 @ HG E 5.

You may use any written material like scripts, your own notes, exercise sheets, books, etc...
All electronical devices (computers, calculators, cell phones, etc...) are not allowed during the exam!

Sample Exam

In order to get a feeling of our exam style, you may have a look at this sample exam and the sample solutions (please excuse the apparent random choice of language in the exercises/solutions).

Exercise Proceedings

At the beginning of every lecture week, we will publish a new exercise sheet here. This exercise sheet is intended to be solved during the exercise session on Thursday where two tutors will be available to assist you and to answer potential questions. The exercises often require information from the lecture notes, so please make sure that you have them available somehow.

You can hand in your solutions for correction after the exercise session on a voluntary basis. This is not mandatory since a Testat is not required to be admitted to the final exam (see here for further information).

Lecture Notes

The following documents are lecture notes of former students. (We provide no guarantee that these documents are correct!)

• Lecture Notes HS 05 (by Daniel Hösli)
• Lecture Notes HS 06 (by Chris Walser)
• Lecture Notes HS 07 (by Andreas Müller)

Lecture material

Exercise material

'Testat'

References