Decentralized supervisory control with communicating controllers

The decentralized control problem for discrete-event systems addressed in this paper is that of several communicating supervisory controllers, each with different information, working in concert to exactly achieve a given legal sublanguage of the uncontrolled system´s language model. A novel information structure model is presented for dealing with this class of problems. Existence results are given for the cases of when controllers do and do not anticipate future communications, and a synthesis procedure is given for the case when controllers do not anticipate communications. Several conditions for optimality of communication policies are presented, and it is shown that the synthesis procedure yields solutions, when they exist for this class of controllers, that are optimal with respect to one of these conditions