Nonblocking supervisory control of nondeterministic systems via prioritized synchronization

Shayman and Kumar (1995) showed that supervisory control of nondeterministic discrete-event systems, in the presence of driven events, can be achieved using prioritized synchronous composition as a mechanism of control, and trajectory models as a modeling formalism, first introduced by Heymann (1990). The specifications considered in this earlier work were given by prefix-closed languages. In this paper, we extend this work to include markings so that nonclosed specifications and issues such as blocking can be addressed. It is shown that the usual notion of nonblocking, called language model nonblocking, may not be adequate in the setting of nondeterministic systems, and a stronger notion, called trajectory model nonblocking, is introduced. Necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of language model nonblocking as well as trajectory model nonblocking supervisors are obtained for nondeterministic systems in the presence of driven events in terms of extended controllability and relative-closure conditions and a new condition called the trajectory-closure condition.