Consistent abstractions for the purpose of supervisory control

A common strategy in the design of discrete event systems is to run synthesis algorithms not on the actual plant model but on abstractions thereof. Depending on the control objectives, certain conditions are imposed on the abstractions, in order to end up with an appropriate supervisory controller for the actual plant. A well known result from the literature is that abstractions obtained by so called natural observers can be used for non-blocking supervisory control. In this paper, we conduct a backward-reachability analysis to obtain alternative conditions that imply a non-blocking and complete closed-loop system for an abstraction-based supervisory controller design.