A practical approach to the design of maximally permissive liveness-enforcing supervisors for complex resource allocation systems

The problem of designing and deploying liveness-enforcing supervisors (LES) for sequential resource allocation systems is well-documented and extensively researched in the current literature. Acknowledging the fact that the computation of the maximally permissive LES is an NP-hard problem, most of the present solutions tend to trade off maximal permissiveness for computational tractability and ease of the policy design and implementation. In this work, we demonstrate that the maximally permissive LES can be a viable solution for the resource allocation taking place in many practical applications, by (a) effectively differentiating between the off-line and on-line problem complexity, and (b) controlling the latter through the development of succinct and compact representations of the information that is necessary for the characterization of the maximal permissive LES.