Klaus Werner Schmidt

Maximally Permissive Hierarchical Control of Decentralized Discrete Event Systems

The subject of this paper is the synthesis of natural projections that serve as nonblocking and maximally permissive abstractions for the hierarchical and decentralized control of large-scale discrete event systems. To this end, existing concepts for nonblocking abstractions such as natural observers and marked string accepting (msa)-observers are extended by local control consistency (LCC) as a novel sufficient condition for maximal permissiveness. Furthermore, it is shown that, similar to the natural observer condition and the msa-observer condition, also LCC can be formulated in terms of a quasi-congruence. Based on existing algorithms in the literature, this allows to algorithmically compute natural projections that are either natural observers or msa-observers and that additionally fulfill LCC. The obtained results are illustrated by the synthesis of nonblocking and maximally permissive supervisors for a manufacturing system.

Fuzzy Discrete Event Systems for Multiobjective Control: Framework and Application to Mobile Robot Navigation

Fuzzy discrete event systems (FDESs) have been introduced in recent years to model systems whose discrete states or discrete state transitions can be uncertain and are, hence, determined by a possibility degree. This paper develops an FDES framework for the control of sampled data systems that have to fulfill multiple objectives. The choice of a fuzzy system representation is justified by the assumption of a controller realization that depends on various potentially imprecise sensor measurements. The proposed framework consists of three basic steps that are performed at each sampling instant. First, the current fuzzy state of the system is determined by a sensor evaluation. Second, the fuzzy state in the future sampling instant is predicted for all possible control actions of the system. Finally, an original multiobjective weighting strategy is proposed to determine the control action to be applied in the current sampling instant. The features of the proposed approach are demonstrated by a detailed mobile robot example, which includes a simulation study.

Distributed Real-Time Protocols for Industrial Control Systems: Framework and Examples

The automation of todays large-scale industrial systems relies on the operation of distributed controller devices that perform local computations and exchange information via communication networks. The subject of this paper is the development of a family of shared-medium industrial communication protocols that support the transmission of real-time (RT) and nonreal-time (nRT) data among distributed controller devices. Different from existing protocols, we suggest to incorporate information that is available from the control application in the protocol definition. As a result, our protocols dynamically change the bandwidth allocation on the shared medium according to the instantaneous communication requirements while ensuring hard RT guarantees. Following the recent developments in industrial automation, our protocols can be realized as software layers on top of low-cost conventional Ethernet.

Computation of supervisors for reconfigurable machine tools

The rapid reconfiguration of manufacturing systems is an important issue in today’s manufacturing technology in order to adjust the production to varying product demands and types. In this paper, we study the control of reconfigurable machine tools (RMTs) with the aim of fast reconfiguration and an easy controller implementation. We first formulate a particular reconfiguration problem for RMTs in a discrete event system setting, and then provide a necessary and sufficient condition for its solution. Moreover, we propose a polynomial-time algorithm for the construction of a reconfiguration supervisor as the composition of one modular supervisor for each separate RMT configuration. Each modular supervisor operates in three modes. In the first mode, it tracks the plant state if its corresponding configuration is inactive. In the second mode, it performs a configuration change if its corresponding configuration becomes active and in the third mode, it follows the specified behavior of its corresponding configuration if the configuration is active. An important property of the proposed reconfiguration supervisor is that it performs reconfigurations in a bounded number of event occurrences. In addition, the modular realization of our reconfiguration supervisor enables controller modifications such as adding or removing configurations during run-time. All results presented in the paper are illustrated by an RMT example.

Verification of Modular Diagnosability With Local Specifications for Discrete-Event Systems

In this paper, we study the diagnosability verification for modular discrete-event systems (DESs), i.e., DESs that are composed of multiple components. We focus on a particular modular architecture, where each fault in the system must be uniquely identified by the modular component where it occurs and solely based on event observations of that component. Hence, all diagnostic computations for faults to be detected in this architecture can be performed locally on the respective modular component, and the obtained diagnosis information is only relevant for that component. We define the condition of modular language diagnosability with local specifications (MDLS) in order to capture that each fault can indeed be detected in this modular architecture. Then, we show that MDLS can be formulated as a specific language-diagnosability problem. As the main contribution of this paper, we develop an incremental abstraction-based approach for the verification of MDLS, which is based on projections that fulfill the loop-preserving observer condition. In particular, our approach efficiently avoids the construction of a global system model, which is infeasible for systems of realistic size. Furthermore, we do not rely on the assumption of a live global plant, which is prevalent in previous diagnosability methods for modular DESs. We illustrate our approach and its computational savings by a manufacturing system example.

A shared-medium communication architecture for distributed discrete event systems

Recently, several efficient supervisor synthesis approaches for distributed discrete event systems (DES) have been established. In this paper, the implementation of such supervisors on interacting distributed programmable logic controllers (PLCs) on a network is considered for the hierarchical and decentralized control approach elaborated in our previous work. A communication model that captures the controller behavior relevant for communication is developed, and a network architecture together with a scheduling policy that ensures correct operation of the networked controllers is proposed. In addition to the formal statements, simulation results for an example system are presented.

Robust Priority Assignments for Extending Existing Controller Area Network Applications

The usage of the controller area network (CAN) as an in-vehicle communication bus requires finding feasible and robust priority orders such that each message transmitted on the bus meets its specified deadline and tolerates potential transmission errors. Although such priority orders can be determined by available algorithms whenever they exist, it is always assumed that a CAN priority order is computed from scratch. In practical applications, it is frequently necessary to extend an existing message set by new messages. In this case, a feasible priority order that retains the standardized IDs of the existing messages and assigns suitable priorities to the new messages needs to be found. This paper proposes an algorithm for the computation of robust priority orders that solves the stated problem of extending existing message sets. First, bounds for the priorities of new messages are determined and then the most robust priority order that keeps the IDs of the existing messages is computed. The obtained algorithms are proved to yield correct results and are illustrated by detailed scheduling examples.

Computation of Supervisors for Reconfigurable Machine Tools

Abstract The rapid reconfiguration of manufacturing systems is an important issue in todays manufacturing technology in order to adjust the production to varying product demands and types. In this paper, we study the control of reconfigurable machine tools (RMTs) with the aim of fast reconfiguration and an easy controller implementation. We first formulate a particular reconfiguration problem for RMTs in a discrete event system setting, and then provide necessary and sufficient conditions for its solution. Moreover, we propose an algorithm for the construction of a reconfiguration supervisor as the composition of one supervisor for each separate RMT configuration and one supervisor that performs the transition between configurations. The reconfiguration supervisor can be computed in polynomial time, and allows configuration changes within a bounded delay. In addition, our method facilitates the addition of a new configuration during system operation.

Efficient Abstractions for the Supervisory Control of Modular Discrete Event Systems

The topic of this technical note is the nonblocking and maximally permissive abstraction-based supervisory control for modular discrete event systems (DES). It is shown, that an efficient abstraction technique, that was developed for the nonconflict verification of modular DES, is also suitable for the nonblocking supervisory control. Moreover, it is proved that this abstraction technique can be extended by the condition of local control consistency, in order to achieve maximally permissive supervision. Different from existing approaches, the presented abstraction does not require to preserve the shared events among the system components in the respective abstraction alphabets, and hence leads to potentially smaller system abstractions. The obtained results are illustrated by a flexible manufacturing system example.

Computation of Supervisors for Fault-Recovery and Repair for Discrete Event Systems

Abstract In this paper, we study the fault-recovery and repair of discrete event systems (DES). To this end, we first develop a new method for the fault-recovery of DES. In particular, we compute a fault-recovery supervisor that follows the specified nominal system behavior until a fault-occurrence, that continues its operation according to a degraded specification after a fault and that finally converges to a desired behavior after fault. We next show that our method is also applicable to system repair and we propose an iterative procedure that determines a supervisor for an arbitrary number of fault occurrences and system repairs. We demonstrate our method with a manufacturing system example.