Synthesizing nonblocking distributed supervisors based on automaton abstraction

Blockingness is one of the major obstacles that need to be overcome in the Ramadge-Wonham supervisory synthesis paradigm. Owing to the high computational complexity usually resulted from synchronous product, it is difficult to synthesize a nonblocking supervisor for a large scale system. In this paper we aim to overcome this difficulty by presenting a distributed synthesis approach. The core idea of this approach is to create abstractions of parts of a target system during the synthesis process to avoid any potentially large representation. Meanwhile, those abstractions allow synthesizing local supervisors which guarantee the global nonblockingness, when they are applied to the target system in a conjunctive style. © 2008 IEEE.