Bridging the Gap between Supervisory Control and Reactive Synthesis: Case of Full Observation and Centralized Control

Abstract

We present a formal connection between supervisory control theory in the field of control engineering and reactive synthesis in the field of formal methods. We focus on the case of fully-observed discrete-event systems that are controlled by a single controller/supervisor in order to achieve a safety specification and a non-blocking specification. The connection is shown by a reduction of the corresponding supervisory control problem to a problem of reactive synthesis with plants and maximal permissiveness, subject to a CTL temporal logic specification. In order to establish the desired reduction, we prove two new results regarding (i) a simplified version of the standard supervisory control problem and (ii) a class of reactive synthesis problems that admit unique maximally permissive solutions. The reduction complements prior work at the boundary of supervisory control and reactive synthesis.