A preliminary application of Petri nets to the supervision of remotely operated systems

In remotely operated weapon systems (ROWS), since the human soldier is involved in the control loop, particular improper operations may cause accidents and result in catastrophes. For such systems, this paper has used a command-filter-based framework to accept or reject the human-issued commands so that undesirable executions would never be performed. In the present approach, Petri nets (PN) are used to model the operated behaviors and to synthesize the command filter for supervision. An application to missile loading and launching processes is provided to show the feasibility of the developed approach. It is believed that the technique presented in this paper could be further applied to large-scale military weapon systems.