This article has been accepted for inclusion in a future issue of this journal. Content is final as presented, with the exception of pagination. IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CONTROL SYSTEMS TECHNOLOGY 1 A BDD-Based Approach for Modeling Plant and Supervisor by Ex

Abstract—In this paper, we settle some problems that are en-countered whenmodeling and synthesizing complex industrial sys-tems by the supervisory control theory. First, modeling such huge systems with explicit state-transition models typically results in an intractable model. An alternative modeling approach is to use ex-tended finite automata (EFAs), which is an augmentation of or-dinary automata with variables. The main advantage of utilizing EFAs for modeling is that more compact models are obtained. The second problem concerns the ease to understand and implement the supervisor. To handle this problem, we represent the super-visor in a modular manner by extending the original EFAs by com-pact conditional expressions. This will provide a framework for the users where they can bothmodel their system and obtain the super-visor in form of EFAs. In order to be able to handle complex sys-tems efficiently, the models are symbolically represented by binary decision diagrams (BDDs). All computations that are performed in this framework are based on BDD operations. The framework has been implemented in a supervisory control tool and applied to in-dustrially relevant benchmark problems. Index Terms—Binary decision diagrams (BDDs), extended finite automata (EFA), supervisor representation, supervisory control theory (SCT), symbolic representation. I