Decentralized control of discrete event systems with specializations to local control and concurrent systems

The decentralized supervisory control problem of discrete event systems under partial observation is studied in this paper. The main result of the paper is a necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of decentralized supervisors for ensuring that the controlled behavior of the system lies in a given range. The contribution of the paper is 1) our setting of decentralized control generalizes the prior ones; 2) we present an alternative approach for solving the decentralized control problem, which leads to computational saving for concurrent systems and certain other systems; and 3) our generalized formulation and its solution lets us extend several of the existing results reported in [1], [10], [6], [7], [11], The results of our paper are illustrated by an example of a simple manufacturing system.