Control of an engineering-structured multilevel discrete-event system

Abstract

Control of a multilevel system is developed for a discrete-event system (DES) structured by an engineering model. In a multilevel system, each subsystem has a set of children at the next-lower level and a unique parent at the next-higher level. A coordinated multilevel DES is defined by the condition that a parent also is involved in the interaction of each tuple of its children. Control synthesis is carried out per subsystem. If the specification language is conditionally decomposable, conditionally controllable, and conditionally normal then there exists a set of supervisors such that the closed-loop system of the multilevel system meets the specification. The complexity gain is considerable. The examples of an MRI scanner and of a vehicle system illustrate the approach.