Supervisor Localization: A Top-Down Approach to Distributed Control of Discrete-Event Systems
Kai Cai (The University of Toronto)
SYSTEMS AND CONTROL SERIESDATE: 2012-10-19
TIME: 11:00:00 - 12:00:00
LOCATION: RSISE Seminar Room, ground floor, building 115, cnr. North and Daley Roads, ANU
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ABSTRACT:
A discrete-event system (DES) is a dynamic system equipped with a state space and a state-transition structure. In particular, a DES is discrete in time and (usually) in state space; it is asynchronous or event-driven: that is, driven by events other than, or in addition to, the tick of a clock; and it may be nondeterministic. Applications of DES are often found in manufacturing systems, traffic systems, and logistic systems. This talk first covers some basics of supervisory control theory of DES, and then introduces a new approach to distributed control of DES, called asupervisor localizationa. The essence of the approach is to allocate supervisor's control action to each individual agent in a collection or team of agents to be controlled. Intuitively the corresponding local controller can be thought of as programmed into the agentas "brain", rather than imposed externally. To achieve this result we start either from the centralized, monolithic supervisor (in the case of small systems) or (for large systems) from a heterarchically-structured array of small modular supervisors, for instance constructed on existing principles of decentralized-hierarchical control. We then make essential use of a known technique of supervisor reduction to decompose the synthesized supervisors' control logic into local individual control strategies. Finally, the approach is illustrated for a manufacturing cell served by a team of AGVs.
BIO:
Kai Cai received the B. Eng. degree in Electrical Engineering from Zhejiang University (China) in 2006, the M.A.Sc. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Toronto (Canada) in 2008, and the Ph.D. degree in Systems Science from Tokyo Institute of Technology (Japan) in 2011. He is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Systems Control Group, with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the University of Toronto. His research interests are distributed control of multi-agent systems, distributed control of discrete-event systems, and control architecture theory for large complex systems. Dr. Cai received the Best Student Paper Award at IEEE Multi-Conference on Systems and Control in 2010, and the Young Authoras Award from SICE in 2010.
