Maximally Permissive Hierarchical Control of Decentralized Discrete Event Systems

The subject of this paper is the synthesis of natural projections that serve as nonblocking and maximally permissive abstractions for the hierarchical and decentralized control of large-scale discrete event systems. To this end, existing concepts for nonblocking abstractions such as natural observers and marked string accepting (msa)-observers are extended by local control consistency (LCC) as a novel sufficient condition for maximal permissiveness. Furthermore, it is shown that, similar to the natural observer condition and the msa-observer condition, also LCC can be formulated in terms of a quasi-congruence. Based on existing algorithms in the literature, this allows to algorithmically compute natural projections that are either natural observers or msa-observers and that additionally fulfill LCC. The obtained results are illustrated by the synthesis of nonblocking and maximally permissive supervisors for a manufacturing system.