Distributed Control of Timed Networked System against Communication Delays

Abstract

When it comes to large-scale systems with hundreds of components, it is often impossible to create a centralized supervisor due to the state size explosion. The number of states in a modular system expands exponentially as the number of system components increases. As a result, the centralized supervisory control synthesis approach has a limitation; it may only be suitable for small systems. In this paper, we study the problem of distributed control of networked discrete event systems with communication delays, for both the control channel and the observation channel. Communication channel amongst distributed supervisors is built on the finite-state automata, expanding the earlier plant automata translation method into the distributed networked control framework. A more flexible modeling method is developed by incorporating time temporal limitations. By a model transformation, we transform distributed networked supervisor synthesis problem into the (non-networked) distributed supervisor synthesis problem (for non-deterministic plants), then existing tools and algorithms can be used for synthesizing distributed networked supervisors.