Supervisory control of discrete-event systems

我们的研究方向是工程和应用数学的分支，称为“自动控制”，有时也称为“控制论”，即反馈系统的科学和技术。这种系统被设计成将一些关键变量或多个关键变量保持在可接受的范围内。例如，一架飞机的自动驾驶仪可以修正风的干扰，否则它可能会使飞机偏离航线，甚至造成灾难。我们特别感兴趣的是系统，如交通和制造系统，它们必须对突然的“事件”做出响应，如车辆进入服务队列或新的零件订单。另一个例子是现代汽车上的自动挂断系统，尽管它是由驾驶者“随机”启动的，但它的设计应该永远不会犯“挂断”或阻塞等逻辑错误。这种“离散事件”系统及其控制要求在控制理论和计算机科学的接口新的和专门的技术。需要克服的一个主要问题是这些系统可能非常庞大和复杂。例如，上面提到的MEMS系统可能潜在地进入数百万个不同的内部“状态”或配置。这可能导致对控制工程设计所需的计算能力的几乎压倒性的要求。我们正在开发将这些系统分解为组件或“层”的方法，就像企业或政府组织中的管理层一样，这样控制的设计就可以变得易于处理。这种研究的预期回报是强大的系统设计程序，保证受控系统将按照预期的行为。这种保证最终转化为更高水平的故障保护，从而提高可靠性和经济性能。

Our proposed research lies in the branch of engineering and applied mathematics called "automatic control" or sometimes "cybernetics", namely the science and technology of feedback systems. Such systems are designed to maintain some critical variable or variables within an acceptable range. For instance, an aircraft's automatic pilot corrects for wind disturbances which might otherwise drive the plane off course, perhaps disastrously. Of specific interest to us are systems, like traffic and manufacturing systems, which must respond to sudden "events", like the arrival in a service queue of a vehicle or a new part order. Another example is the pushbutton system on a modern automobile which, although "randomly" activated by the motorist, should be designed never to commit a logical error like "hangup" or blocking. Such "discrete-event" systems and their control call for new and specialized techniques at the interface of control theory and computer science. A major problem to overcome is that these systems can be very large and complex. For instance, the pushbutton system mentioned above may potentially enter many millions of different internal "states" or configurations. This may lead to almost overwhelming requirements on the computing power required for control engineering design. We are developing ways of decomposing such systems into components or "layers", like the levels of management in a business or government organization, so that the design of controls can be made tractable. The expected payoff from such research is powerful systematic design procedures which guarantee that the controlled system will behave as desired. Such guarantees translate ultimately into higher levels of protection against malfunction, and therefore into improved reliability and economic performance.