Decentralized supervisory control with communicating controllers

The decentralized control problem for discrete-event systems addressed in t his paper is that of several communicating supervisory controllers, each wi th different information, working in concert to exactly achieve a given leg al sublanguage of the uncontrolled system's language model. A novel informa tion structure model is presented for dealing with this class of problems. Existence results are given for the cases of when controllers do and do not anticipate future communications, and a synthesis procedure is given for t he case when controllers do not anticipate communications, Several conditio ns for optimality of communication policies are presented, and it is shown that the synthesis procedure yields solutions, when they exist for this cla ss of controllers, that are optimal with respect to one of these conditions .