A bridge between decentralized and coordination control

In decentralized supervisory control, several local control agents (supervisors) cooperate to achieve a common goal, expressed by a safety specification and/or by nonblockingness. It is well-known that coobservability is the key condition to achieve the specification as the resulting language of the controlled system. One of the most important problems is to compute a coobservable sublanguage of the specification. This paper shows how recent results in coordination control of modular discrete-event systems help to construct a coobservable sublanguage in a computationally cheap way. The impact of coordination control on decentralized control is discussed in detail.