A Framework for Optimal Control of Discrete Event Systems

A framework for optimal control has been developed for controlling discrete event systems (DESs), where a controller is one that selects unique control actions. Prior work on supervisory control studied the design of supervisors, where a supervisor's control action determines a set of events to be disabled, but no selection for executing an enabled event is made. We synthesize a controller that selects a unique control actions from among those enabled by a supervisor based up on a certain cost optimization criterion: Starting from any state, the worst cost of the surviving paths to the nearest reachable marked states is minimized. The motivation is that a pending task be completed in the least possible cost. Our work diers from prior ones on optimal control of DESs [13, 12, 3, 15, 16, 10] in that we have a dierent cost criterion, plus the optimization is performed over the set of controllers, rather the set of supervisor