This monograph proposes how to manage complexity by organizing the system as a State Tree Structure (STS). Based on STS, which is an adaptation of statecharts to Supervisory Control Theory, an efficient recursive symbolic algorithm is presented that can perform nonblocking supervisory control design in reasonable time and memory for complex systems. Nonblocking Supervisory Control of State Tree Structures presents how this results in tractable and highly comprehensible controllers, especially to users who are not specialists in Discrete - Event Systems.

This monograph presents a systematic top-down approach to distributed control synthesis of discrete-event systems (DES). The approach is called supervisor localization; its essence is the allocation of external supervisory control action to individual component agents as their internal control strategies. The procedure is: first synthesize a monolithic supervisor, to achieve globally optimal and nonblocking controlled behavior, then decompose the monolithic supervisor into local controllers, one for each agent. The collective behavior of the resulting local controllers is identical to that...