Decentralized Supervisory Control with Communicating Supervisors Based on Top-Down Coordination Control

In this paper we present a new approach to decentralized supervisory control of large automata with communicating supervisors. We first generalize the recently developed top-down architecture of multilevel coordination control with a hierarchical structure of groups of subsystems, their respective coordinators and supervisors. Namely, in the case where the equivalent conditions for achieving a specification language fail to be satisfied, we propose sufficient conditions for a distributed computation of the supremal achievable sublanguage. We then apply the obtained constructive results of multilevel coordination control to decentralized supervisory control with communication, where local supervisors of subsystems within a group communicate with each other via the coordinator of the group. Our approach is illustrated by an example.