Estimation and Inference in Discrete Event Systems chooses a popular model for emerging automation systems—finite automata under partial observation—and focuses on a comprehensive study of the key problems of state estimation and event inference. The text includes treatment of current, delayed, and initial state estimation. Related applications for assessing and enforcing resiliency—fault detection and diagnosis—and security—privacy and opacity—properties are discussed, enabling the reader to apply these techniques in a variety of emerging applications, among them automated manufacturing processes, intelligent vehicle/highway systems, and autonomous vehicles.

The book provides a systematic development of recursive algorithms for state estimation and event inference. The author also deals with the verification of pertinent properties such as:

• the ability to determine the exact state of a system, “detectability”;
• the ability to ensure that certain classes of faults can be detected/identified, “diagnosability”; and
• the ability to ensure that certain internal state variables of the system remain “hidden” from the outside world regardless of the type of activity that is taking place, “opacity”.

This book allows students, researchers and practicing engineers alike to grasp basic aspects of state estimation in discrete event systems, aspects like distributivity and probabilistic inference, quickly and without having to master the entire breadth of models that are available in the literature.