Supervisory Control Design for Nondeterministic Systems With Application to Network Management

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

9626399 Shayman Discrete systems are systems that involve quantities which take on a discrete set of values and which are constant except at discrete times when events occur in the system. Examples include communication networks, intelligent vehicle highway systems, manufacturing systems and computer programs. Supervisory control theory was developed to provide a mathematical framework for the design of controllers for such systems in order to meet various constraints. The majority of the research effort in this area has focused on the supervisory control of deterministic systems. However, unmodeled dynamics or partial observation often leads to {\it nondeterministic models} in which knowledge of the current state and next event is insufficient to uniquely determine the next state. Distributed systems commonly have nondeterministic models. The research program described in this proposal is intended to extend supervisory control theory so that it can accommodate technical issues that arise in the automation of fault management for communication networks. These include, among others, the effects of a distributed plant on the information available to the supervisor as well as tradeoffs between the effectiveness of control and the cost of information. The latter is especially important for network management since the information gathering process of monitoring the network elements diverts network resources from the primary task of data transfer. ***