Modeling and Control of Networked Discrete‐Event Systems

Abstract

Modern engineering systems and cyber‐physical systems often consist of many distributed and networked physical plants, control units, and other devices with wired or wireless communication networks to exchange information between controllers and plants. These systems are called networked systems. In this article, we review supervisory control of networked discrete‐event systems. We first discuss how to model networked discrete‐event systems and how to obtain state estimates using a networked observer. We then introduce and solve the following supervisory control problems of networked discrete‐event systems: (i) (nondeterministic) supervisory control problem, (ii) deterministic supervisory control problem, (iii) nonblocking supervisory control problem, (iv) robust supervisory control problem, (v) robust deterministic supervisory control problem, (vi) deterministic decentralized supervisory control problem, and (vii) nonblocking decentralized supervisory control problem. We present and prove necessary and sufficient conditions for solving the above problems. Finally, we list the open problems in supervisory control of networked discrete‐event systems.