With supervisory control theory it is possible to describe controllers which influence the behaviour of a system by disabling controllable events. But sometimes it is desirable to have a controller which not only disables controllable events but also chooses one among the enabled ones. This event can be interpreted as a command given to the plant. This idea is formalized in the concept of an im...

A genetic algorithm (GA) uses the principles of evolution, natural selection, and genetics to offer a method for parallel search of complex spaces. Motivated by past work using the GA as a tool for off-line computer-aided-design of control systems, we introduce several ways to use the GA for on-line identification and controller tuning. In particular, we introduce two new, but closely related a...

Standard switching control methods are based on the certainty equivalence philosophy in that, at each switching time, the supervisor selects the candidate controller that is better tuned to the currently estimated process model. If the estimated model does not appropriately describe the process, this procedure may result in the selection of a controller that is not appropriate for the actual pr...

Supervisory control theory enables control system designers to specify a model of an uncontrolled system in combination with associated control requirements, and subsequently to use a synthesis algorithm for automatic controller generation. The use of supervisory control synthesis can significantly reduce development time for supervisory controllers as a result of the unambiguous specification ...

In this paper, the supervisory control synthesis of modular or distributed discreteevent systems is discussed. The coordination-control architecture proposed by Komenda and van Schuppen (2008) and studied for prefix-closed specification languages by Komenda et al. (2010a,b) is generalized to the case of non-prefix-closed global specification languages and non-prefix-closed plant languages. Nece...

This work focuses on the design of a supervisory predictive control system for the optimal management and operation of a stand-alone wind-solar energy generation system which provides power to a reverse-osmosis (RO) water desalination system. We design the supervisory control system via model predictive control which coordinates the wind and solar subsystems as well as a battery bank to best sa...

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 c...

The paper presents sufficient conditions for modular (supervisory) control synthesis to equal global control synthesis. In modular control synthesis a supervisory control is synthesized for each module separately and the supervisory control consists of the parallel composition of the modular supervisory controls. The general case of the specification that is indecomposable and not necessarily c...

Discrete event simulations for futuristic unmanned vehicle (UV) systems enable a cost and time effective methodology for evaluating various autonomy and humanautomation design parameters. Operator mental workload is an important factor to consider in such models. We present that the effects of operator workload on system performance can be modeled in such a simulation environment through a quan...