Plug and play: Modular supervisor reduction in discrete-event systems

This paper is concerned with the elimination of unnecessary states in discrete-event system control agents. Several approaches to supervisor reduction are studied and a new relation between agents known as comparability is defined to encapsulate most of the concepts found in these methods. This relation is proven to be preserved under conjunction, which is commonly employed to determine the centralized representation of two modular DES supervisors. This fact in turn yields a “plug-and-play” application of comparability that provides a method to generate a set of efficient modular agents from a group of specifications. An example of such an application on the classic Ramadge and Wonham “Small Factory” problem is included.