Mutually nonblocking supervisory control of discrete event systems (Q5926190)

The paper addresses the problem of modular supervisory control where given two specifications the control objective is to keep the plant within as large a subset of their intersection as possible. A supervisor is called mutually nonblocking if whenever the closed-loop system executes a trace marked by one specification it can always continue and complete a trace marked by the other specification. Thus a measure of fairness is required and enforced. This finds its applications in control of several interesting discrete event systems, such as manufacturing, communication protocol and feature interaction in telephony systems. The paper derives a number of theoretical results that characterize conditions under which a complete, globally and mutually nonblocking supervisor exists. The main result is that a complete, globally and mutually nonblocking supervisor exists if and only if there exists a controllable mutually nonblocking sublanguage of the union of the specifications. The paper shows that such condition holds if the specifications are mutually nonconflicting with respect to the prefix closure of each other.