Supervisory Control of a Class of Discrete Event Processes

The paper studies the control of a class of discrete event processes, i.e., processes that are discrete, asynchronous and possibly nondeterministic. The controlled process is described as the generator of a formal language, while the controller, or supervisor, is constructed from a recognizer for a specified target language that incorporates the desired closed-loop system behavior. The existence problem for a supervisor is reduced to finding the largest controllable language contained in a given legal language. Two examples are provided.