On Scalable Supervisory Control of Multi-Agent Discrete-Event Systems

In this paper we study multi-agent discrete-event systems where the agents can be divided into several groups, and within each group the agents have similar or identical state transition structures. We employ a relabeling map to generate a “template structure” for each group, and synthesize a scalable supervisor whose state size is independent of the number of agents. This scalability allows the supervisor to be invariant (no recomputation or reconfiguration needed) if and when there are agents removed due to failure or added for increasing productivity. Moreover, the computational effort for synthesizing the scalable supervisor remains the same even if the number of agents increases, and hence our method may handle large-scale multi-agent systems. We provide three examples to illustrate our proposed scalable supervisory synthesis and the resulting scalable supervisors.