Control of Partially-Observed Discrete-Event Systems: The State of the Art and Some New Results

Stéphane Lafortune
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
University of Michigan
USA

 

We present an overview of key results on the control of partially-observed discrete-event systems. Both centralized and decentralized control architectures are considered. The control framework adopted is that of the theory of supervisory control of discrete event systems, initiated by Ramadge & Wonham in the 1980's. Four key properties of this discrete-event system theory are: controllability, nonconflicting, observability, and co-observability. We focus on the properties of observability and co-observability. The first part of the talk presents computational complexity and decidability results regarding the synthesis of safe and nonblocking partial-observation supervisors for centralized and decentralized systems. The second part of the talk presents a decentralized control architecture where the control actions of the individual supervisors are combined by ``fusion by union'' (of enabled events) for certain controllable events and ``fusion by intersection'' for the other controllable events. The properties of this architecture are described and contrasted to previous architectures considered in the discrete event systems literature.