Nonblocking Supervisory Control of Flexible Manufacturing Systems Based on State Tree Structures

Much research has been addressed to nonblocking supervisory control of Discrete-Event Systems (DES) such as Flexible Manufacturing Systems (FMS), and a variety of approaches have been developed. One especially powerful approach, due to Chuan Ma, is based on DES representation by means of State Tree Structures (STS). Using STS, this chapter develops nonblocking supervisory control of a well-known benchmark FMS example taken from the literature, for which the description was given originally as a Petri net. The authors straightforwardly obtain the optimal (maximally permissive) and nonblocking supervisory control, and display the control logic for each (controllable) event transparently as a binary decision diagram.