Supervisory control and reactive synthesis: a comparative introduction

This paper presents an introduction to and a formal connection between synthesis problems for discrete event systems that have been considered, largely separately, in the two research communities of supervisory control in control engineering and reactive synthesis in computer science. By making this connection mathematically precise in a paper that attempts to be as self-contained as possible, we wish to introduce these two research areas to non-expert readers and at the same time to highlight how they can be bridged in the context of classical synthesis problems. After presenting general introductions to supervisory control theory and reactive synthesis, we provide a novel reduction of the basic supervisory control problem, non-blocking case, to a problem of reactive synthesis with plants and with a maximal permissiveness requirement. The reduction is for fully-observed systems that are controlled by a single supervisor/controller. It complements prior work that has explored This work was primarily supported by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) Expeditions in Computing project ExCAPE: Expeditions in Computer Augmented Program Engineering (grant CCF-1138860). Additional support from the following sources is also acknowledged: the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Michigan, Rice University, Aalto University, the iCyPhy Research Center (supported by IBM and United Technologies), the Academy of Finland, NSF award CNS-1329759, and the Institutional Strategy of the University of Bremen, funded by the German Excellence Initiative. Stéphane Lafortune [email protected] 1 University of Bremen, Bremen, Germany 2 DFKI GmbH, Bremen, Germany 3 University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA 4 University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA 5 Aalto University, Helsinki, Finland 6 Rice University, Houston, TX, USA Discrete Event Dyn Syst problems at the interface of supervisory control and reactive synthesis. The formal bridge constructed in this paper should be a source of inspiration for new lines of investigation that will leverage the power of the synthesis techniques that have been developed in these two