In: Proceedings of the 35th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, pages 4433-4438. December 1996. This paper is not brand new and need not appear in the newsletter, though it should appear in the database.
Abstract: This paper expands upon results of previous research dealing with the supervisory control of Petri net modeled discrete event systems that contain uncontrollable transitions. It represents the current state of progress, as well as recent results, in an ingoing research project in the area of Petri nets in discrete event system control. The concept of unobservable plant transitions is introduced here and incorporated into the controller design procedure. New conditions are developed which govern the existence of controllers for these problems. Two procedures are presented for automatically generating controllers for plants that incorporate uncontrollable and unobservable events, and the current work toward determining conditions that indicate the optimality of these controllers is illustrated.