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Abstract: Supervisory control theory enables control system designers to specify a model of the uncontrolled system in combination with control requirements, and subsequently use a synthesis algorithm for automatic controller generation. The use of supervisory control synthesis can significantly reduce development time of supervisory controllers as a result of unambiguous specification of control requirements, and synthesis of controllers that by definition are nonblocking and satisfy the control requirements. This is especially important for evolving systems, where requirements change frequently. For successful industrial application, the specification formalism should be expressive and intuitive enough to be used by domain experts, who define control requirements, and software experts, who implement control requirements and synthesize controllers. This paper defines such a supervisory control specification formalism that consists of automata, synchronizing actions, guards, updates, invariants, independent and dependent variables, where the values of the dependent variables can be defined in terms of functions on the independent variables. We also show how the language enables systematic, compositional specification of a control system for a patient communication system of an MRI scanner. We show that our specification formalism can deal with both event-based and state-based interfaces. To support systematic, modular specification of models for supervisory control synthesis, we introduce state trackers that record sequences of events in terms of states. The synthesized supervisor has been successfully validated by means of interactive user guided simulation. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The complexity of the design of supervisory controllers for today's high-tech systems is ever increasing with the rise in demands for higher safety and functionality. Supervisory control synthesis enables the design engineer to automatically generate a supervisory controller from a model of the plant and a model of the controller requirements. Although supervisory control theory is an active research area, the number of industrial applications remains relatively low. One of the main reasons for this is the lack of guidelines for practical applications of supervisory control theory, especially in case of large-scale systems with numerous components and complex dependencies. In this paper, guidelines are given for the process of obtaining and validating a supervisory controller, more specifically for large-scale systems with isomorphisms. Systems with isomorphisms are systems with a high degree of symmetry and repetitiveness in their components, such as manufacturing lines with parallel processing lines or infrastructural systems with repeating modules. This paper shows how coordination between the steps in obtaining a supervisory controller for a large-scale system improves the efficiency of the process and quality of the end result, and how the isomorphism of components in the system can be exploited in these steps. This process is demonstrated in this paper by a case study related to the Eerste Heinenoordtunnel, a road tunnel in the Netherlands. The case study shows the steps of modeling the plant and the controller requirements, performing model reduction based on isomorphisms in the system, synthesizing the supervisory controller, and validating the controller by means of simulation. • A supervisor for a road tunnel is synthesized with 10257 states. • Parameter-based modeling is introduced as an accessible modeling method. • The model is reduced using isomorphisms decreasing the synthesis time by a factor 210. • The synthesized supervisor is validated by means of visualized simulations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]