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Overview of networked supervisory control with imperfect communication channels

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Abstract

This paper presents an overview of the networked supervisory control frameworks for discrete event systems with imperfect communication networks, which are divided into the centralized setup, the decentralized setup and the distributed setup. The state-of-the-art works on networked supervisory control of discrete-event systems addressing the channel imperfections that are caused by channel delays, data losses or non-FIFO channels are discussed. By presenting the key concepts and main results of each representative work, we analyze the pros and cons of different approaches. Finally, we also provide a summary of the existing works, which roughly follow two different lines of thinking and result in two different verification or synthesis approaches. The first approach utilizes simple, non-networked plant models but relies on the development of sophisticated concepts of network controllability and observability to capture network imperfections, while the second approach embeds relatively complex yet verifiable channel models into the model of the networked plant and adopts the standard concepts of controllability and observability for the (verification and) synthesis of networked supervisors. Some future research topics are also presented.

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Notes

  1. There are notable exceptions. For example, in Tripakis (2004), it is shown that the existence of decentralized controllers in the cases of unbounded-delay is an undecidable problem.

  2. a suffix of a string s is a substring that occurs at the end of s

  3. Conditional controllability is one of the central notions to characterize the solvability of the coordination control problem.

  4. ||L|| represents the minimum state size of the automata that recognizes L.

  5. In the definition for subset inclusion between collections of multi-sets, we shall treat each multi-set as an element. Thus, \(\{((m_{\sigma }, 1), 3)\} \subseteq \{((m_{\sigma }, 1), 3), ((m_{\sigma }, 3), 2)\}\), while in our convention we write \(\{((m_{\sigma }, 1), 1)\} \not \subseteq \{((m_{\sigma }, 1), 3), ((m_{\sigma }, 3), 2)\}\).

  6. If mlss = {}, then clearly \(mlss^{\prime }=\{\}\).

  7. When the time-to-leave is zero, the corresponding message must leave the queue within the current time step and cannot get lost.

  8. If such a k does not exist, we treat k = 0.

  9. If mlss = {}, then clearly \(mlss^{\prime }=\{\}\).

  10. Synthesis tool can be found at https://www.ntu.edu.sg/home/rsu/Downloads.htm.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Prof.Lin Feng for providing valuable suggestions in our preparation of this work.

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  1. Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore

    Yuting Zhu, Liyong Lin, Ruochen Tai & Rong Su

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  1. Yuting Zhu
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Correspondence to Yuting Zhu.

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This work was financially supported by Singapore National Research Foundation via Delta-NTU Corporate Lab Program (DELTA-NTU CORP LAB-SMA-RP2 SU RONG M4061925.043) and by Singapore Ministry of Education Tier 1Academic Research Grant (2018-T1-001-245 (RG91/18)).

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Zhu, Y., Lin, L., Tai, R. et al. Overview of networked supervisory control with imperfect communication channels. Discrete Event Dyn Syst 33, 25–61 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10626-022-00368-2

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