Think Globally, Act Locally: Decentralized Supervisory Control

Decentralized supervisory control is investigated by considering problem formulations that model systems whose specifications are given as global constraints but whose solution is described by local controllers. A necessary and sufficient condition is given for the existence of a solution to the problem of finding decentralized supervisors that ensure that the behaviour of the closed-loop system lies in a given range. Where the range of behaviour can be described by regular languages, it can be effectively tested whether the decentralized control problem is solvable; in this case, a procedure is given to compute the associated supervisors.