On observability of discrete-event systems (Q1102899)

The supervised discrete-event system is considered. The set of possible events is partitioned into the sets of controllable and observable events. State transitions are governed by the language generated by the transition function and the alphabet of event labels. The system control consists of on-off enabling and disabling of controllable events according to the changes in a sequence of observable events. Such a closed-loop feedback structure is formalized as a finite state automaton. The existence problem for a supervisory controller, respecting both controllability and observability constraints, is solved abstractly. The presented work heavily depends on previous papers published by the authors [see, e.g., SIAM J. Control Optimization 25, 206-230 (1987; Zbl 0618.93033); and, Analysis and optimization of systems, Proc. 7th Int. Conf., Antibes/France 1986, Lect. Notes Control Inf. Sci. 83, 202-214 (1986; Zbl 0595.93047)].