Synthesis and Implementation of Distributed Supervisory Controllers with Communication Delays

This paper discusses a method to distribute a synthesized supervisory controller for implementation on multiple physical controllers. Dependency structure matrices are used to determine a distribution of a discrete event system. The supervisor is then distributed accordingly, using an existing localization method. Communication delays between the distributed components of a supervisor may affect its behavior, due to changes in the order of events. Therefore, a delay-robustness check is performed and where needed mutex locks are employed to make the distributed supervisor delay-robust. A case study demonstrates the method, and hardware-in-the-loop testing is used to validate the distributed supervisor.