This proposal is concerned with complex engineering systems that have a distributed architecture. These distributed networked systems occur in many different application areas, including automotive, transportation, and manufacturing systems. The design of integrated control strategies for these systems requires the consideration of logical specifications that must be enforced regarding safety, liveness, diagnosability, modularity, reconfigurability, and fault tolerance. This is the realm of discrete-event system and control theory. There is no satisfactory theory at this time for distributed control of networked discrete-event systems that is computationally efficient and thus scalable to complex engineering systems. This proposal aims at developing such a theory and its associated analysis and synthesis algorithms. This work will result in distributed algorithms that will be implemented in software and made available to the research community.
Intellectual merit: This research will have a significant technological impact on the systematic design of modular discrete-event controllers for a wide variety of complex distributed engineering systems. The investigators have several industrial collaborators in the automotive and manufacturing sectors. Their expertise will be sought frequently in the course of this research project to guide the theoretical investigations and identify appropriate case studies.
Broader impacts: (i) involvement of female or under-represented minority graduate or undergraduate students in this project; (ii) development and teaching of a course on analysis and control of complex distributed discrete-event systems aimed for practicing engineers working in R&D; (iii) active collaborations with research engineers in industry; and (iv) active collaborations and student exchanges with international researchers.
