Hierarchical Interface-Based decentralized Supervisory Control

Abstract

The Hierarchical Interface-Based Supervisory Control (HISC) framework was proposed to address challenges inherent in modeling the behavior of large, complex systems. Such systems are often characterized by decentralized or distributed architectures, where agents have only a partial view of the system behavior and cooperate to achieve the control objective, aspects unsupported by HISC. We introduce the Hierarchical Interface-Based Decentralized Supervisory Control (HIDSC) framework that extends HISC to decentralized control. In decentralized control, the specification must satisfy a property called co-observability. The verification of co-observability requires the (possibly intractable) construction of the complete system. To adapt this property for HIDSC, we propose a per-component definition of co-observability along with a verification strategy that does not require the construction of the complete system. We provide and prove the necessary and sufficient conditions for supervisor existence in this new framework and illustrate our approach with an example.