Nonblocking supervisory control of state tree structures

• Published in: IEEE transactions on automatic control Vol. 51; no. 5; pp. 782 - 793
• Main Authors: Chuan Ma, Wonham, W.M.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York, NY IEEE 01.05.2006; Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Algorithm design and analysis; Algorithms; Applied sciences; Automata; Binary decision diagrams; Computer science; control theory; systems; Control system synthesis; Control theory. Systems; Controllers; Design engineering; Discrete-event system; Exact sciences and technology; Explosions; Modelling and identification; nonblocking supervisory control; Organizing; Recursive; Sociotechnical systems; state tree structure (STS); State-space methods; Statecharts; Supervisory control; symbolic computation; Tree data structures; Trees; Tree structured method; Discrete-event system; nonblocking supervisory control; Control synthesis; Tree structure; State space method; Symbolic computation; Recursive algorithm; State diagram; NP hard problem; state tree structure (STS); Supervision; Discrete event system
• ISSN: 0018-9286; 1558-2523
• DOI: 10.1109/TAC.2006.875030

It is well known that the nonblocking supervisory control problem is NP-hard, subject in particular to state space explosion that is exponential in the number of system components. In this paper we propose to manage complexity by organizing the system as a state tree structure (STS). STS are an adaptation of statecharts to supervisory control theory. Based on STS we present an efficient recursive symbolic algorithm that can perform nonblocking supervisory control design (in reasonable time and memory) for systems of state size 10/sup 24/ and higher. The resulting controllers are tractable and readily comprehensible.