Extraction and Representation of a Supervisor Using Guards in Extended Finite Automata

Paper in proceeding, 2008

In supervisory control theory, an issue that often arises in real industrial applications is the huge number of states for the supervisor, which requires a lot of memory. Another problem that is typically encountered for the users of supervisory synthesis tools is lack of information and unreadability of the supervisor. In this paper, we introduce a method to characterize a controllable and non-blocking supervisor directly on the modular automata (sub-plants and sub-specifications), by extracting some guard conditions from the synthesized supervisor and the synchronized automaton. The presented approach may potentially model a complex supervisor using a compact representation whilst not infringe the original modular structure. Furthermore, the guard conditions, which are generated from a set of states, may give the user of the synthesis procedure a better understanding of which states that were removed during the synthesis. In order to obtain more compact guard expressions, we include some unnecessary states (unreachable and extended forbidden states) in the set of states that will be used for guard generation. By exploiting this extra information, it is possible to reduce the logical expressions to more compact guard conditions.