State Attraction Under Language Specification for the Reconfiguration of Discrete Event Systems

In this note, we study a particular setting for the reconfiguration of discrete event systems (DES) that is applicable to the control of reconfigurable manufacturing systems (RMS). We consider DES that can operate in different configurations and we are interested in the realization of configuration changes. Different from previous work, we intend to reach a set of plant states where a new configuration can be started in a bounded number of transitions and at the same time fulfill a behavioral specification before starting the new configuration. To this end, we introduce the concept of weak attraction under language specification (WALS) and derive necessary and sufficient conditions for its verification. Using WALS, we propose a polynomial-time algorithm for computing a supervisor that performs the described configuration changes. We demonstrate the applicability of our method using a workcell of an RMS.