Multi-decision decentralized control of discrete event systems : Application to the C&P architecture

This article deals with decentralized supervisory control, where a set of supervisors cooperate in order to control a plant. We propose a new control framework where each supervisor issues a tuple of so called micro-decisions, instead of a single decision for a controllable event. The proposed approach is called multi-decision supervisory control and is intended to be applicable to any existing decentralized architecture in order to generalize the latter. In this paper, we demonstrate the applicability of the new framework to the conjunctive and permissive (C&P) architecture. The obtained architecture is naturally called C&P multidecision architecture. We define and study the notion of C&P m-coobservability, which is useful to characterize the class of achievable languages. Since C&P m-coobservability seems to be undecidable, we finally propose a stronger and obviously decidable version of C&P m-coobservability.