Elaborative orderings of condition languages

This paper considers condition languages, where the language specifically specifies sequences of system inputs and outputs that are true, rather than just indicating the changes as events. This avoids the potential state explosion of the commonly found event-based automata, which must keep track of the current state of the system inputs through its own state. We introduce an elaborative ordering, which is used to compare the amount of detail among sequences. This allows us to clearly relate the detailed closed-loop condition language of a system to high-level, less-detailed sequences specifying desired behaviors.