A new class of supervisors for partially observed discrete event systems

Most of the research on supervisory control of discrete event systems considers a supervisor which takes a control action according to only event sequences. This paper proposes a new class of supervisors which assign a control pattern based on partial observations of both events and states. The authors consider the case that control specifications are given in terms of formal languages. The authors derive necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of their proposed supervisor. Then it is shown that their supervisor is more powerful than an event based supervisor considered in Cieslak et al. (1988) and Lin and Wonham (1988). Moreover, the authors study a sublanguage of a given language for which their supervisor exists.