On the separation of estimation and control in discrete-event systems

The discussion of this paper concerns both centralized and decentralized control of logical discrete-event systems. Of interest are the maximal information sets of the centralized or decentralized supervisors and the potential for control and estimation policy independence. We show that there exists a form of a centralized supervisor´s maximal information sets that is independent of the supervisor´s control policy. We also show that this method of separation is not generally applicable in decentralized settings. These results are consistent with the literature in stochastic control; however, supervisory control potentially presents a more simple framework in which to explore these concepts