State Transition in Reconfigurable Systems

Reconfigurable systems that maintain a high level of performance under changing operational conditions and requirements are an ongoing research challenge. Many existing systems are able to work under narrow operational conditions only. They should perform the configuration transitions from the current state to a desired one smoothly. The question is: how to find the optimal state transition trajectory that configures the system from an initial state to a desired state? We present a method to determine steps (list of actions to be taken) of state transitions for reconfigurable systems. This method makes use of graph search algorithms that solve shortest path problems and that are commonly used in routing: Dijkstra’s algorithm and the A* algorithm. The method is applied to the design of a reconfigurable printer, which has to change its configuration to achieve maximum performance (e.g. high quality of print) when operational conditions are changing (e.g. speed of printing).