Supervisory control of discrete-event systems

我们提出的研究属于工程和应用数学的分支，称为“自动控制”或有时称为“控制论”，即反馈系统的科学和技术。这类系统的设计目的是将一些关键变量或变量保持在可接受的范围内。例如，一架飞机的自动驾驶仪会纠正风的干扰，否则可能会导致飞机偏离航线，这可能是灾难性的。我们特别感兴趣的是系统，比如交通系统，它必须对突发的“事件”做出反应，比如车辆进入服务队列；制造系统必须对新零件订单或机器故障做出反应。另一个例子是现代汽车上的按钮系统，尽管它是由驾驶者“随机”激活的，但它应该被设计成永远不会犯“挂断”或阻塞等逻辑错误。

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 systems, which must respond to sudden "events", like the arrival in a service queue of a vehicle; and manufacturing systems, which must respond to a new part order or machine breakdown. Another example is the pushbutton system in 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 challenge is that these systems can be very large and complex. For instance, the automobile pushbutton system may potentially enter many millions of different internal "states" or logical configurations. This may lead to almost overwhelming requirements on the computing power for control engineering design. We are developing ways of decomposing such systems into components or logical "layers", like the levels of management in a business or government organization, so that the design of controls can be rendered tractable. We are also exploring how such architectural principles can be combined with advanced computing techniques. The expected payoff from this 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.