The paper provides an overview of Multilevel Flow Modeling (MFM) and its application for design of displays for supervisory control of industrial plant. The problem of designing the information content of supervisory displays is discussed and plant representations like MFM using levels of means-end and part-whole abstractions are proposed as a solution to this design problem. The basic concepts...

Supervisory control theory for discrete event systems is based on finite state automata whose inputs are partitioned into controllable and uncontrollable events. Well-known algorithms used in the Ramadge-Wonham framework disable or enable controllable events such that it is finally possible to reach designated final states from every reachable state. However, as these algorithms compute the lea...

Hierarchical Interface-Based Supervisory Control employs interfaces that allow properties of a monolithic system to be verified through local analysis. By avoiding the need to verify properties globally, significant computational savings can be achieved. In this paper we provide local requirements for a multi-level architecture employing command-pair type interfaces. This multilevel architectur...

In this paper we investigate computational issues associated with the supervision of concurrent processes modeled as modular discrete-event systems. Here, modular discrete-event systems are sets of deterministic finite-state automata whose interaction is modeled by the parallel composition operation. Even with such a simple model process model, we show that in general many problems related to t...

In this paper we extend the theory of supervisory control of nondeterministic discrete event systems subject to nondeterministic speci cation developed in We focus our attention on nonblocking and liveness considerations and develop algorithms for nonblocking supervisor synthesis

In this paper, we formulate the optimal supervisory control problem (OSCP) under partial observation and propose an algorithm to design the optimal nonblocking supervisor (ONS). In addition, we introduce an extended net cost including the observation cost of the events which is taken into account for the cost of setting up a mechanism to sense the events and solve the OSCP with the extended net...

SUMMARY The objective of this paper is to describe recent progress in the field of hybrid control of nonlinear systems. We address the problem of controlling a nonlinear dynamical process by means of an hybrid controller, i.e. a controller that combines continuous dynamics with discrete logics, the latter used to switch, from time to time, between several continuous controls laws. The hybrid co...

Discrete-event systems (DES) can be found as essential integrated subsystems in many complex systems, e.g. electrical power systems. Under-load tap-changing (ULTC) transformers which obviously have discrete-event behavior are widely used in transmission systems to take care of instantaneous variations in the load conditions in substations. In this paper, the voltage control problem in ULTC is s...

There is a pressing need for supervisory control interfaces that allow single human operators to effectively control large numbers of robots or unmanned vehicles. Although increasing levels of autonomy make it possible to control robots at higher-and-higher levels, we must still be able to respond to unforeseen problems with lowlevel intervention. In this paper, we present RIDE, a supervisory c...