Decentralized Control Using the Hierarchical Interface-based Supervisory Control Approach

The Hierarchical Interface-Based Supervisory Control (HISC) framework was proposed to address challenges inherent in modeling the behavior of large, complex systems. Such systems are often characterized by decentralized or distributed architectures, where agents have only a partial view of the system behavior and cooperate to achieve the control objective, aspects unsupported by HISC. We introduce the Hierarchical Interface-Based Decentralized Supervisory Control (HIDSC) framework that extends HISC to decentralized control. In decentralized control, the speci cation must satisfy a property called coobservability. The veri cation of co-observability requires the (possibly intractable) construction of the complete system. To adapt this property for HIDSC, we propose a per-component de nition of co-observability along with a veri cation strategy that does not require the construction of the complete system. We provide and prove the necessary and su cient conditions for supervisor existence in this new framework and illustrate our approach with an example.