Decentralized control of Petri nets with constraint transformations

Supervision based on place invariants (SBPI) has been effectively used for the centralized supervisory control of Petri nets. In the SBPI approach, specifications are classified as admissible or inadmissible, and inadmissible specifications are enforced by transforming them first to a (more restrictive) admissible form. This paper considers the transformation to admissible specifications in a decentralized setting. In this setting, the system can only be controlled and observed locally. The design goal is to find local supervisors, each controlling and observing a part of the system, such that a global specification is enforced. The feasibility of this problem is demonstrated with a simple integer programming approach. This approach can incorporate communication between local supervisors as well as communication constraints.