Multimodal Nonblocking Supervisory Control Synthesis

Abstract

Supervisory control synthesis leverages the nonblocking property to show liveness of the supervised system. This property is particularly weak when system models include fault behavior, reconfiguration, or multiple control goals. To capture a more suitable nonblocking property for such system models, this paper introduces modal and multimodal nonblocking. These novel nonblocking variants impose a restriction on the states visited on the path towards a marked state. Synthesis algorithms are presented to construct modal and multimodal nonblocking supervisors. The novel nonblocking variants are illustrated with three intuitive examples, inspired by real synthesis problems encountered while applying supervisory control synthesis to safety-critical water infrastructures. A comparison is made between the novel nonblocking variants and established nonblocking variants to show that they are distinct. Additionally, where possible, conditions are formulated under which one variant implies the other.