Coordinating Autonomy: Sequential Resource Allocation Systems for Automation

The integrating role that is sought by automation in many contemporary applications frequently can be abstracted to the need for pertinent supervision of a function that allocates a finite set of reusable resources to a set of concurrently executing processes. This article formalizes the corresponding supervisory control problem, surveys the major results that are currently available for it, and highlights the remaining open challenges for the corresponding research community. In the process, it also reveals the analytical and computational advantages that can be attained from the reference of the considered problem to some appropriate control-theoretic frameworks and the additional potential that is defined for such an analytic approach by the identification and exploitation of some essential problem features and the special structure that is defined by them.