Supervisory control of discrete event systems

In its earliest formulation, supervisory control theory for discrete event systems addresses formal control synthesis for discrete event systems in an abstract framework of formal languages and automata. Key properties determining existence of controllers include controllability and (co-)observability of languages. A principal theme is the modular decomposition of control problems as a means of managing their complexity. Recent work has added such features as real time and infinite event strings to the modelling framework, and contributed to the management of computational complexity through the introduction of structural assumptions and on-line synthesis procedures.