Supervisor Localization of Discrete-Event Systems under Partial Observation

TL;DR

This paper extends supervisor localization for discrete-event systems to partial observation scenarios, employing relative observability and hierarchical synthesis to efficiently control large-scale systems with observable-only events.

Contribution

It introduces a novel partial-observation supervisor localization method using relative observability and hierarchical synthesis for large-scale systems.

Findings

Effective partial-observation supervisor localization method.

Hierarchical synthesis approach for large systems.

Controllers only respond to observable events.

Abstract

Recently we developed supervisor localization, a top-down approach to distributed control of discrete-event systems. Its essence is the allocation of monolithic (global) control action among the local control strategies of individual agents. In this paper, we extend supervisor localization by considering partial observation; namely not all events are observable. Specifically, we employ the recently proposed concept of relative observability to compute a partial-observation monolithic supervisor, and then design a suitable localization procedure to decompose the supervisor into a set of local controllers. In the resulting local controllers, only observable events can cause state change. Further, to deal with large-scale systems, we combine the partial-observation supervisor localization with an efficient architectural synthesis approach: first compute a heterarchical array of partial-observation decentralized supervisors and coordinators, and then localize each of these supervisors/coordinators into local controllers.