Privacy-Preserving Supervisory Control for Data Opacity Enforcement

The privacy-preserving control problem in discrete-event systems at the supervisory control layer is the central focus of this article. The key objective is to cosynthesize an edit function and a supervisor, working together to achieve the following goals: first, ensuring data opacity to prevent external intruders from deducing the system’s secret, second, ensuring the system performance adheres to safety and nonblockingness specification, and third, preserving the covert nature of the edit function, creating uncertainty about its presence to external intruders. By transforming this cosynthesis problem into a distributed supervisor synthesis problem in the Ramadge–Wonham supervisory control framework, this article introduces two heuristic synthesis approaches to incrementally cosynthesize an edit function and a supervisor. The effectiveness of the proposed approaches is demonstrated via a running example on location privacy.